


You Are Safe (I Know)

by hephaestiions



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Azkaban, Blood, Dissociation, Drinking, Exile, H/D Erised 2020, Hand Jobs, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Hyperventilation, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, M/M, Minor Character Death, Panic Attacks, Past Abuse, Person of Color Harry Potter, Post-Second War with Voldemort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Racism, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:29:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 42,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27562315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hephaestiions/pseuds/hephaestiions
Summary: Draco Malfoy is sentenced to one year of exile following his participation in the Second Wizarding War. Harry Potter tags along.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 62
Kudos: 405
Collections: H/D Erised 2020





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Spielzeugkaiser](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spielzeugkaiser/gifts).



> Thanks to the Mods who were kind enough to keep up with my strange timelines. Thanks to my beta who also kept up with my strange timelines. This is my take on a story of grief and love, found in the most trying times because two lost boys chose to turn the light on together. To my lovely recipient, whose likings seemed to be tailor made to mine: Thank you for the wonderful work you put out into the fandom and for your take on these boys and how they work. It's been a delight to write for you. Enjoy your stay! 
> 
> Note that I know next to nothing about legal proceedings and therefore Draco’s trial is based off the scene that usually plays out in my imagination when I think of Harry speaking at it. I doubt it’s true to fact and therefore, I would encourage any readers who find severe discrepancies between actual court proceedings and what happens here to imagine the wizarding world’s understanding of legal issues to be only similar to Muggle proceedings at a surface level. They do their own thing. 
> 
> The discussion of racism here is personal and individual, and not meant to be representative of the experiences of POC as a whole. I bear no grudge to any larger groups who may have been depicted offensively in this work of fiction, they were merely a tool in the larger machinations of the story. The discussion of mental health and trauma is also not meant to be comprehensive and is based off my personal experiences with both the subjects.
> 
> However, this is not a story about me. It’s about Harry and Draco and a sentence of exile interpreted by different people differently. It’s about travel and love, spoken and unspoken, and here I leave you with a piece of my heart that was born from all the things I hold dear but cannot claim to possess. I hope the story is as kind to you as it was to me.

_“Yes, there is a place where someone loves you, both before and after they learn what you are. That place is called the world, and if you wanna live, it’s really the only option. You could choose not to, but then where would you get really great sandwiches?”_   
_—Neil Hilborn, “A Place Where Someone Loves You.”_

**2nd May, 1998**

Harry finds Parvati sitting on the steps to the Divination Tower, Lavender’s curly head cradled in her lap. 

“I lost my box of bangles,” she tells Harry when he comes close enough. “My grandmother sent it to me from Gujarat. Ma’s going to kill me.” 

At first glance, Lavender appears unconscious. Now, with the eerie stillness of her body bent at odd angles on the stone steps, Harry registers in the more rational part of his mind that isn’t screaming with exhaustion or numb from shock that she’s dead. The back of her white shirt is tattered and bloody from the unmistakable slash of a werewolf’s claws.

He remembers the sick crunch of bones as Fenrir and Lavender’s bodies had hit the floor. Remembers Hermione’s shriek of rage mingled with terror. Remembers Lavender’s broken wrist flexing weakly. 

“Lavender’s dead,” Harry says, the words weighted and heavy on his uncooperative tongue. Parvati blinks. 

“I hope Padma still has her box. She has Ma’s favourite pair in it, the pretty glass bangles with the gold leaves. I wore those to the Yule Ball with you. Lavender said I looked like a princess.” 

Harry looks down again, at the mess of brown curls strewn across Parvati’s lap, the puddle of blood forming around her shoes. Rivulets of it trickle down the steps, the rhythmic plops audible in the comparative stillness of this part of the castle.

Death has its symphony, Harry has come to realise. In the rhythm of blood and the crescendo of screams, in the drumbeat of bodies falling, in the thundering of a heart.

“We need to take her body back to the Great Hall,” he says. “They’ll know what to do.”

“Do you think I’ll find the box?” Parvati asks. 

“She’s dead.” 

Parvati’s dark eyes are hooded, but dry. “Ma really will kill me, then,” she says with a slouching shrug. There’s something broken about her posture. Errant strands escape her tight braid, sticking to the sweat on the side of her face. There’s a broad gash above her eyebrow, caked with dried blood and dust. Up close, her skin looks unnaturally pale.

“Parvati,” Harry says, kneeling down to her eye level. Her hands are tangled in Lavender’s collar, obscured by the unnatural slant of Lavender’s back. Parvati stares at him, face blank. “We need to take Lavender to the Hall, now.” 

The words seem to register. Parvati looks down at her lap. “Oh,” she says. 

“Yeah.” 

“Harry?” she says, looking at him, eyes desolate and shuttered. 

“Yeah?” 

“I think I’m bleeding out.” 

“What?” 

“My back—there’s… blood pouring from it. I can feel it, it’s sticky and it’s getting all over her hair. Her hair really is ridiculously long. She promised to teach me how to cut it after…” 

“ _What_ , I—fuck, Parvati, fuck, _is anyone there_ , shit, Parvati—” 

“Harry,” she interrupts, quietly. “When I die, tell Padma to burn me with the glass bangles with gold leaves.” 

“You’re not fucking _dying—_ ” 

The words die on his dry, bloodied lips, festering like poison in the spaces between his teeth, when her eyes roll back. She slumps forward, neck lurching at an awkward tilt, body shielding Lavender’s from the rest of the prying world. She lies there, silent and still, more blood pooling around her feet, soaking the steps in the stench of death. 

Harry raises his hand to the side of her neck, feeling for a pulse. Harder, harder, his frantic fingers search, pushing ruthlessly against the delicate curve of her limp throat. Even a broken thread of it would be hopeful enough— 

nothing. 

Nothing. 

Nothing. 

There’s a sound, an awful, violent, earth-shattering sound shaking the core of Harry’s soul, rocking the foundations of the stones he’s kneeling on. There’s a sound and it’s gathering, there’s a sound and it’s shattering, there’s a sound and Harry feels the vibrations of it in his chest, in his magic, in every isolated cell of himself. 

There’s a sound and it’s devastating. 

There’s a sound and Harry’s making it. 

Footsteps thunder up the stairs, the hum of voices, the frantic buzz of spells and incantations. A soft and soothing voice in Harry’s ear says, “Harry, Harry, it’s going to be okay, Harry, hey, Harry, please, look at me…” 

The sound hits a crescendo—his eardrums rattle with it, his breath shakes with it. The parched back of his throat is slaked with the blood of it, and the broken spaces between his ribs echo. 

Then there’s silence. Darkness. 

Nothing. 

Nothing. 

Nothing. 

—

Draco watches the Weasleys slump over the body of their fallen brother with a sick twist in the pit of his stomach. The brood-mother—Molly, he corrects himself, wincing, is bent over her son’s chest, sobbing uncontrollably into a chest that will not swell with breath again. The father has his son’s head cradled in his lap, tears falling freely down a face lined and shadowed with immeasurable pain.

Father would never let himself cry over me in public if I died, Draco thinks absently, before shaking his head free of the thought. He isn’t dead, and his father is sitting in a cell somewhere, probably thinking up strategies to get himself out of there as soon as possible. 

Potter’s Weasley—Ronald—is holding one of his brother’s hands, eyes fixed somewhere on the far wall of the Great Hall. Somebody has reached into the heart of his vibrancy and scooped all of it out onto the blood-soaked floors. The living twin is lying on the floor beside his brother, looking up at the once star-studded ceiling. He isn’t making a sound, but he’s trembling all over and someone has placed a blanket on him that looks a little too close to a shroud. 

Somewhere in the din of voices and screams, a baby cries. 

He spins, and almost slips, looking down to catch himself standing in the middle of a puddle of blood. The thin threads holding him upright snap and he rushes out of the Great Hall on shaky knees, retching violently into a pile of rubble gathered outside. 

“Did the blood you shed not appeal to that posh palate?” someone asks. Draco looks up and Ginevra Weasley is fixing him with a cold, dead-eyed look. 

“I—” he begins before realising he has nothing to say to her. Her brother is dead, her friends are dead and her boyfriend just killed the man whose Mark Draco bears rather prominently on his arm. 

_If this is how I die, let it be quick._

“Harry saved your life,” she says, tilting her head to the side. “Hermione told me.” 

“He—” Fire and heat flash behind his eyes. The scent of burning books, burning hair, Crabbe’s burning flesh. Potter’s voice, sharp and clear, his waist firm beneath Draco’s quivering hands. Potter’s eyes, dismissive and vague outside the burning Room of Hidden Things. Goyle telling Draco in a wet undertone, _Hey, man, Vince’s still in there, reckon we should get him?_ “Well—yes.” 

“You didn’t deserve it,” she says. Her voice doesn’t waver, but it’s different from the one he’s accustomed to hearing from her when they brush hostile shoulders in the corridors. The sound of wind chimes and forest fires has been replaced by an intensity—dark and bloodthirsty and angry. 

“I didn’t,” Draco says, because when there’s nothing else to say, the truth works just fine. “He should have left me in the fire.” 

She laughs. It’s a broken, horrifying sound, like a nightingale singing in a graveyard. Out of place. Wrong. “Killing Tom Riddle is the first thing Harry has done that he _should_ have. I don’t know why you’re still alive Malfoy, when—when—but you don’t deserve to be.” 

Grief hasn’t dulled her fire. If anything, it’s fuelled it. 

“And if you don’t do something with this grotesque, undeserved, pathetic life of yours, I’m going to end it with my bare hands.” 

He blinks. Her face is twisted with anger, her hands are clenched in barely repressed violence. But she seems to be—

“You didn’t deserve it,” she says, rage clipping her vowels short. “You didn’t.” 

In a blur of ginger hair and shuddering steps that eventually break into a desperate run, she’s gone. 

**17th May, 1998**

The Mind Healer cleared Harry to testify a week ago. 

“Your PTSD requires extensive psychotherapy and you are definitely showing symptoms of chronic depression and anxiety, but there’s nothing I have found that renders you mentally incapacitated or intellectually disadvantaged.” 

Malfoy’s possible reaction to that comment perches on the edge of his consciousness. Harry imagines him saying in that haughty accent, “You didn’t find Potter intellectually disadvantaged? Some Mind Healer.” 

He takes the slip confirming he is of sound mind to Malfoy’s barrister and says, “I’m testifying for him.” 

The man—appointed by Kingsley, given that no one would voluntarily touch a Death Eater’s case with a ten-foot pole—had stared at the document with unrestrained curiosity. “Are you quite certain?” he’d eventually asked, looking uncertain and slightly nervous. 

It had taken Harry a minute to realise that the nervousness stemmed from the man’s possible awe of being in his presence. Familiar stirrings of anger frothed in his mind. 

“If I wasn’t, I would not be here handing you a slip confirming myself as his character witness.” 

“Well—” begins the man—Barrister Dench, Harry notes—“Testifying for my client is a bit of a risk to one’s reputation as an upstanding man of wizarding society.” 

Harry’s stance turns frigid. “Are you an upstanding man of wizarding society, sir?” 

“Indeed,” blusters the man. “The Minister appointed me—”

“There appears to be a wide chasm between being an upstanding member of wizarding society and being a decent fucking human being,” Harry snarls. “And if you wish to take even a single step in the direction of bridging that fucking gap, you’ll put me on the stand and let me tell the Wizengamot that Malfoy was a child when half this shit went down.” 

The barrister closes his gaping mouth and nods once. With one last cold look his way, Harry storms out of the office, the clean bill of mental health from his Healer bunching in his grip.

—

Azkaban is cold. 

It’s dark and filled with screams and forgotten echoes of forgotten people and their forgotten pain, but above everything else, it is freezing. 

The Dementors are not there anymore, but whatever created them still lingers in the gaps between the stones. Wisps of darkness settle in the frigid air of Draco’s cell, seeping chill into his bones. _This_ , Draco thinks, _is misery made physical_. This is pain drawn into a grotesque figure, despair turned into a dark ocean with sinister shapes lurking behind the curved angle of each wave. 

If this is what created Bellatrix and the Snatchers, despite himself, Draco understands. Somewhat. Even his father’s smooth edges came back ruffled and haunted after his brief stay. 

Draco wonders in that small space his mind is curling itself into to preserve whatever strands of sanity are left, if this is how he’s going to die. Alone. Broken down. Cold. 

It’s so fucking _cold._

There’s a sound outside. The warden perhaps—his empty stomach tightens and his brain prepares for the inevitable onslaught. But then the round face of his barrister is visible through the bars of his cell. He’s standing inside a protective bubble full of the light and warmth of a non-corporeal Patronus and if Draco’s envy could manifest, it would choke the man on its poisoned vines. 

“I said I would plead guilty,” Draco croaks at him. The man’s been badgering him about pleading guilty and making his job easier for days. Initially, Draco hadn’t refused, but he hadn’t agreed either, aware that things in the wizarding world aren’t as certain as the Muggle one. There’s no definitive assurance that if he pleads guilty he will get a shorter sentence or a gentler one. 

There was also the matter with his own mind, the struggle he’d been on the verge of losing that whispers constantly, even now, that he doesn’t deserve a shorter sentence or a gentler one, but he isn’t about to admit that to his self-righteous barrister whose condescending blinking drives Draco to teeth-grinding frustration.

Eventually he’d given in, the image of his mother’s perfect chignon torn askew by stray hexes, the bruise on her throat purple and painful flashing behind his eyes. If for nothing else, for her sake he needs to try to come out of this dark hole he and his father have dug themselves into. For her sake he needs to try to ensure this hole is not his grave. 

“It’s not about that,” Dench says now, voice muted through the protective layer of his bubble’s magic. “Someone agreed to testify as your character witness.” 

Draco sits up. His bones complain at the movement, creaking like an arthritis patient’s swollen joints. It’s demeaning, the pain of it—no Malfoy has learned to starve in the cold of prison—but Draco couldn’t care less about indignity in the face of the thin ray of light that Dench is pouring into his cramped cell. There’s pain permeating through the frosty numbness of his lower body and the radiating pounding of his headache almost sends him crashing back to the floor, but he remains upright through sheer force of will and the last vestiges of his fading strength channeled into the clench of his knuckles on the stone floor. 

“Someone agreed to testify? You said my mother couldn’t—” 

“It’s not your mother.” 

He doesn’t know why anyone else would offer. His father is locked away in another cell somewhere in this godforsaken place, his friends are Slytherins with vague loyalties or Dark Marks on their own arms, and therefore more likely to character assassinate him with any testimony. Not that half of them would agree—Goyle stopped speaking to him since the day he finally managed to accept that Crabbe wasn’t coming back, Theo is holed up in his Manor, depressed and drunk, Blaise doesn’t care and Pansy… Pansy would probably tell the jury to fuck off. And then they’d both be thrown back into this shithole with each other for company, and wouldn’t that be a pretty picture, Pansy calling the warden _darling_ as he beats them both black and blue.

“Who?” he asks, wincing at the naked hope colouring his voice. This is what the darkness feeds on. He can feel it immediately, crowding in on him—hungry, yawning mouths eager to suck the faint glimmers of it from his soul. 

“Harry Potter,” Dench says after a brief, pregnant pause, and the darkness swallows Draco whole from the way his chest explodes with fragmented light. 

**21st May, 1998.**

Harry watches them drag Malfoy in by the scruff of his Azkaban-issue outfit—a misshapen white smock that has turned grey and brown in patches. He swims in it, collarbones sticking out, wrists knobbly and the rest of his body a vague shape beneath the unbecoming outfit. 

Harry has heard about the importance of dressing well for hearings. The jury looks upon you favourably when they see you capable of decency. If any part of the jury’s decision hinges on Malfoy’s outfit, he’s going right back into the darkness he’s emerged from. There’s a violence surging in him, a chest monster that has been roaring in the hollow cavern of his ribs since the sound of war and the screams of the bereaved stopped. He clenches his fist against the tabletop, reigning himself in. It would not reflect well on himself or Malfoy if he were to hex the guards. 

Malfoy looks… haggard. His blond hair is matted, almost brown, his skin is sallow and the bruises beneath his eyes are purple. There are mottled green and blue bruises blooming across his bare forearms and he watches the thin line of Dench’s lips when he takes them in. Malfoy’s eyes flicker with fear and cowardice mingled with something of better mettle, something stronger, something fiercer that Harry has never seen on those features before. 

He’s manhandled into the chair in the middle of the courtroom and the Wizengamot jury’s eyes are focused on him as one. Harry doesn’t have to wonder at how it must feel—the shock and terror and sheer overwhelming too-muchness of it. But oh, Malfoy. 

Malfoy doesn’t look phased. 

Training, Harry thinks with a bitter smirk. All that pure-blood pomp and show, all the haughtiness bred into him since he was a precocious child blooming into an insufferable bastard of a teenager. He remembers the way Malfoy’s laughter sounded—high and nasty across the Great Hall. He remembers, more importantly, the cool mask of Malfoy’s superiority settling on his face when arguably, he should have been at his most vulnerable. 

Now, despite the ragged smock and the greasy, stringy hair and the slight limp to his gait, Malfoy looks every bit the little prince. Harry can almost imagine the caustic words lurking behind the firm set of his lips, the snarl of his mouth as he tells the guards he’ll be _having a word with their superiors._ But for better or worse, he remains quiet—unmoving and pliable as the rough guards lock his feet and his arms into the straps on the chair. 

There’s no question about Malfoy’s position in this room. Prisoner. Criminal. _Flight risk_ screams the way he jerks his arm upwards to test the give of the strap. _Broken_ murmurs the resignation in his eyes when their magic responds by tightening further. _Death Eater_ smirks the way his left arm has been tied down—the inner forearm exposed to every voyeuristic eye taking pleasure in what this prince has been reduced to. 

_Little boy,_ sees Harry in the way his shoulders hunch.

It’s simultaneously infuriating and relieving and Harry finds himself at a loss of how to process this Malfoy—the unfamiliarity of his position contrasted ruthlessly against the familiar, defensive jut of his chin

It’s an act, Harry realises the second Malfoy’s eyes rove over the crowd and settle on him. Behind the blankness of his mask is the terrified boy Harry is here to defend, the one who stepped into a lake of blind loyalty for his parents without knowing how to swim. There’s something pleading and desperate in that gaze, and Harry’s heart unwillingly clenches. He’s not here to be emotional, he’s here to do what’s right, but Malfoy’s grey eyes full of desperate defiance snaps the thin boundary between the two. 

Malfoy isn’t going back to the darkness if Harry has something to say about it. 

—

Potter looks angry. 

Draco isn’t sure if it’s anger with him or with the world, but from the way his jaw is clenched and his knuckles are white against the edge of his seat, Draco figures it might be a combination of both. 

Something about Potter has always put Draco’s instincts at a confusing juxtaposition of immediate backpedal and aggressive offence. Run away from his intensity, pull his pigtails till he cries. 

Potter screams, and sometimes Draco wants to scream with him, and sometimes he wants to slap his hand over Potter’s mouth and leave him silenced forever. 

He doesn’t know why Potter is here. Dench didn’t know either. When Draco asked, Dench told him in no uncertain terms that if he was going to look a gift horse in the mouth and ask it to trot off, Dench would ride it and trot off too. 

It was a terrible analogy, Draco isn’t sure why Dench is a practicing barrister if his grip of the language is the way that it is, but he understood the point being made well enough. No testimony in the wizarding world could be better for one’s trial than the Saviour’s. Except perhaps Albus Dumbledore’s, but since Draco is almost single-handedly responsible for that particular individual’s death, it definitely isn’t one he’s getting. He doubts Dumbledore would testify either way if he were alive. Crafty old man with his crafty blue eyes and his crafty spells. Sometimes Draco wants to dig him out of his white grave and shake his skeletal shoulders and ask him why he didn’t save Draco though he knew. 

He knew, he knew, _of course_ he knew. 

Was it the Dark Mark, Draco muses, watching the way a Wizengamot member’s eyes slide away from his the moment he chances to look upon her, that kept Dumbledore from saving him? Couldn’t be, Snape had a Mark too. But Snape was a spy, ambiguous loyalties cut into every line of age-old grief on his face. The sly smirk of his lips spoke of a man worthy of the Dark Lord’s inner circle, the wrinkle between his brows of a man with misery tainting his murky soul black with the shattered remnants of hope. 

And every line of him, every cruel word and every quick spell, spoke of a love torn from him, first by James Potter’s charming smile and then the Dark Lord’s broken promise. Every action shaped and moulded by his bone deep ache for Lily Evans’ embrace. 

_Love_ , Draco thinks, derisively. _What a lie._

If he hadn’t loved his parents, he wouldn’t be seated in front of a hostile jury, awaiting the least severe of the possible punishments courtesy of his guilty plea and Harry Potter’s testimony. 

They’re standing now—for the Minister, Kingsley Shacklebolt in all his authoritative glory stalking in with files under his burly arms, sharp eyes surveying the crowd of people in the circular pews before settling with unerring accuracy on Draco. 

Draco cannot stand, his hands are shackled to the wooden armrests, and his feet are weighted down. _Prisoner,_ his body screams to anyone who looks. _We have tied down the legs that stepped on the Saviour’s face. We have tied down the hands that let Death Eaters into our sanctum._

But Draco refuses to be beholden to shackles. Refuses to be tied down by a guard who pleasured himself in the dingy cells of Azkaban by beating Draco black and blue once he got hold of the knowledge that Harry Potter would be testifying. Every time Draco closes his eyes, the cruel slant of the guard’s lips come back to him, the impact of each blow, the ache of it afterwards. 

He won’t succumb. 

So he does the best he can with Kingsley’s heavy eyes fixed on him, and bows his aching head in the one thing he finds hopelessly unfamiliar—respect. Respect for a man who appointed him a defence, respect for the man who took the broken reins of the broken world, respect for the man who refuses to let a Marked Death Eater be swallowed by the yawning maw of Azkaban’s black mouth without a trial as fair as one can be for a man like him. 

To his surprise, Kingsley nods back. A short, slight jerk of his head before he turns away to confer with his assistant, but more recognition than Draco dared to hope for. The small threads of possibility flickering like the flames of sputtering candles on a stormy night twist themselves into something thicker, something warmer in the cold topography of his frozen insides. 

His charges are read out, the voice reading them tinged with derision, contempt and disgust. Draco at fourteen would have shuddered with indignant fury at the tone. Draco at seventeen accepts it. 

Draco at seventeen deserves to be dead. 

When they ask him how he pleads, Draco wets his dry lips with a shaking tongue and says, “Guilty.” 

The word is a shuddering bird in this courtroom of hostile predators, cracked down the middle and dead before it hits the ground. The word is a broken remnant of what Draco’s words were once, haughty and accented and sharp to a fault. 

The word is a sentence in itself, and he watches the way half the courtroom shakes their sorrowful, resigned heads at their notebooks where they jot down his plea in unison. 

_Guilty._

Potter’s green eyes are dark with the thunderstorms of whatever righteous anger he feels. Dench’s unnaturally white teeth are clenching down on his lower lip. By the time Potter is summoned, Draco is exhausted. Watching one’s own fate be decided in this manner feels treacherous. Feels like sneaking into God’s workshop to hear his deliberations. 

It tastes like treason, and for Draco, who has been drinking the poison of it for the last few years of his life, it tastes like his father’s curt reprimands and his mother’s coaxing caresses and Pansy’s pride. 

_You did this to yourself,_ he reminds. _You did this with every blow you struck and every deal you made and every time you hexed someone in the passages of the Castle you both called home._

Traitor. 

_Guilty._

Potter rises when he is called upon, and the stifled gasp of half the courtroom is loud and jarring. Potter’s fire-ridden eyes snake their way around the pews and some of the surprised members lean back from the intensity of his gaze. 

“I am here to testify to what Draco Malfoy is,” Potter begins and Draco hears the distinct terms he’s using grate against the fragile flutters of his ill-advised hope. _What,_ not _who._ _Is_ , not _was_. The paranoid, anxious part of him laughs bitterly, already believing he’s been tricked. “And I am here to confirm the allegations that many have that he is what he has been charged to be—a willing Death Eater, the brand of it present for the world to see on his left arm. I have to add to it that he is a bully, a bigot and a privileged child, none of which I have been spared the negative aftereffects of.” 

The blooming bud of hope in Draco’s chest dies with a shriek. 

“But to the respected witches and wizards of the Wizengamot, I have to say that any trial that does not take into account either the accused’s age or his familial background is not as fair as the Honourable Minister of Magic, Kingsley Shacklebolt, would like it to be. 

“Draco Malfoy took the Mark when he was sixteen years old. I am certain that many present here today do not recall their teenage years with pride or prestige. I know for a fact, my dear friend and fellow war hero, Ronald Weasley does not. While there is a valid point to be raised—there is a difference between bungling up one’s first enthusiastic kiss and taking a megalomaniac fool’s brand of unquestioning loyalty, there are many emotions that I dare to say are common. Misplaced faith in one’s own abilities being one of them.” 

There are small titters of reluctant but genuine laughter. Draco wonders who wrote this speech for him. Not Granger, she would never be anything but clinically factual. Not Weasley, he wouldn’t know how to frame half the sentences Potter is speaking. Potter himself looks likelier and likelier, but Draco is loathe to contemplate that somewhere along the way, Potter became eloquently funny. 

“Draco Malfoy’s father is Lucius Malfoy, a man known to hold deeply prejudiced, dangerous and misguided notions about Muggle-borns and half-bloods. Lucius Malfoy placed Ginevra Molly Weasley’s life, when she was eleven years old, in extreme danger by acquainting her with a Dark Artefact wherein she gained access to a part of Tom Riddle’s mind. In the well-known battle of the Department of Mysteries, where my godfather Sirius Black passed away, Lucius Malfoy displayed no qualms when attacking students far less magically proficient than him with Dark Curses. I was there. I saw the man. I am more than certain that his disregard for the lives of vulnerable children extended to the one in his own home.

“I have encountered the accused’s bigotry at the age of eleven. No child of eleven is capable of forming bigoted, prejudiced views about an entire class of people by themselves. It is more than obvious that the mentalities Mr Malfoy has been exposed to throughout his childhood have gone a long way in shaping his bigotry which played a part in his misguided decisions.

“I have evidence that Mr Malfoy regretted most of the decisions he was coerced into through loyalty to his family—a sentiment hopefully most of us sympathise with—and the Dark Lord’s manipulations. He was tasked with letting Death Eaters into Hogwarts at the risk of the Dark Lord killing his family should he fail. He was sixteen, and searching for a chink in the armoured chainmail of Hogwarts’ defences. 

“The night my mentor Albus Dumbledore died at Professor Snape’s hands, Draco Malfoy was on the verge of killing him. I was there, hidden under an Invisibility Cloak. There are Pensieve memories I have submitted to the Minister confirming the same. Draco Malfoy lowered his wand when Dumbledore offered him help and safety. He was willing to betray the Dark Lord, and if Snape had not stepped in, I strongly believe we would not be here today, debating a child’s decisions. 

“I also have here Luna Lovegood and Dean Thomas’ signed declarations that though they were held captive at Malfoy Manor for weeks and subjected to inhuman abuse, the accused often provided them and other prisoners—even the Muggle ones, with food, warm blankets and potions to heal their wounds. He did this at great personal risk to himself upon discovery. He never participated in any of the torture though he was subjected to the less than forgiving consequences at Bellatrix Lestrange’s hand for his insubordination.” 

Potter pauses, and the silence in the room rings in Draco’s ears. Many of the Wizengamot members are wincing from the impact of the last sentence and Draco’s ribs ache with the ghost of the memories. His aunt’s mad laughter. His mother’s silent tears. His father’s disappointment. The wand shaking and falling from his grip.

 _Crucio_ leaves its scars in the trembles between Draco’s toes, the nerves in his calves that will never heal quite right. 

Potter takes a breath and continues, “But perhaps, most importantly, Draco Malfoy was instrumental in saving my life. When Hermione Granger, Ronald Weasley and myself were captured by the Snatchers, Bellatrix, Lucius and Narcissa pressurised Draco to identify us. Undoubtedly, it would have been a glorious step up for him in the Dark Lord’s ranks should he have complied. He refused to answer, buying us time and a visit from the Dark Lord. Later, in a scuffle, he allowed me to disarm him, changing the allegiance of not only his own wand to me, but also the Elder Wand.” 

Another gasp from the whole Wizengamot. 

“I defeated the Dark Lord with Draco Malfoy’s wand. I watched Tom Riddle’s body fall to the floor of the courtyard with the magic I cast with Malfoy’s wand. And whether this courtroom pardons him or not, I will remain indebted to the give of his grip and his uncertainty in his own indoctrinated beliefs. Without it, none of us would be here today, systematically exterminated by Voldemort and his followers.”

Draco doesn’t fucking deserve this. 

Potter pauses again. He seems hesitant. 

“Draco Malfoy is a Death Eater only in name. He was unable to bring himself to torture Muggles or kill Muggle-borns or half-bloods or cast _Crucio_ on unsuspecting children. I have firsthand knowledge of this. It led to great disappointment from all his family members except Narcissa Malfoy. At the very worst, he was a schoolyard bully but”—Potter braces himself visibly for what he’s about to say—“so were arguably my father and Sirius Black, my godfather, two of the men hailed today as war heroes and martyrs of the resistance. They were both given a chance to redeem themselves, and they did, despite Sirius’ unfortunate and unfair stint in Azkaban. How fair would this trial be if a seventeen-year-old boy isn’t offered the same chance?” 

There are frowns in the pews. Draco understands the sentiment wholeheartedly—Potter threw the men who died to protect him under the proverbial bus to testify for Draco of all people. It’s bizarre and if not for the cutting straps pushing into his wrists, Draco would have thought he was caught in some fever dream. 

Some of the frowns are turning considering and Draco’s amazement skyrockets. When he looks back at Potter, the green gaze as unbearable and alluring as staring into the sun strikes Draco in the face. 

“I am not here to tell you Draco Malfoy is a perfect man. I am not even here to tell you that Draco Malfoy’s scales are balanced. I am simply here to say that a boy my age, a boy I have grown up seeing laughing with his friends in the Great Hall deserves to not be locked up in a place that produced Bellatrix Lestrange, Fenrir Greyback and countless others with gruesome war crimes to their names for the rest of his life. Draco Malfoy deserves a chance to balance the scales because he has proven he is capable of it. He deserves the chance to learn.” 

Potter stops, and the courtroom is silent. Nobody had known what to expect of Potter’s testimony, but no stretch of the imagination seemed to have prepared anyone, including Draco, for _this_. 

“The prosecution may cross-examine the witness,” Kingsley’s voice booms through the room. Oh right. They’d almost forgotten that part. 

The woman—Anita Cosgrove—stands up and clears her throat. It’s rather obvious she isn’t entirely sure what to say. Not for lack of confidence or competence—Dench had buried his face in his hands when he’d heard she would be representing the Ministry—but because countering Harry Potter has become exponentially more daunting ever since the Order of Merlin, First Class has been added beside his name. 

“Mr Potter,” she begins, clearing her throat, looking down at her notes. “You submitted Pensieve memories of everything you testified to having witnessed, yes?” 

Potter nods. Says in a sharp, clear voice, “That is correct, ma’am.” 

“How precisely are there Pensieve memories of Draco Malfoy being subjected to torture by Bellatrix Lestrange? Were you a witness to this, Mr Potter?” 

Potter hesitates. Draco picks up on something he isn’t saying. “Luna Lovegood and Dean Thomas’ memories have been submitted. As have Ginevra Weasley’s, from the times Mr Malfoy was summoned to torture members of the underground resistance group within Hogwarts—Dumbledore’s Army.” 

“You said you had firsthand knowledge, Mr Potter.” 

Potter looks down. Then back up. Only those who had made it a mealtime obsession to carefully catalogue each and every one of Potter’s expressions would recognise the slight falter. 

“It is not a secret that the Dark Lord divided his soul into Horcruxes. Hermione Granger and I have revealed this to the press prior to this hearing. I was… in touch with one of these Horcruxes. It led us to form something of a mental link with the Dark Lord. We were able to gain insight into his… memories without his knowledge. I have seen Draco Malfoy refusing to do Voldemort’s bidding. I have felt the… weight of his disappointment turn to satisfaction at the possibility of torturing… a… an innocent face.” 

Potter looks nauseous. So do half the pews. Anita Cosgrove looks like she regrets ever having asked the question. 

“Do we have Pensieve evidence of this?” she asks. 

“Would you like Pensieve evidence of it?” Potter asks immediately. He looks calm, but Draco can tell from the subtle baring of his teeth that he’s incensed. 

“No further questions,” Cosgrove says, taking a step back. 

“The witness may be seated,” Kingsley booms. Potter sits. Draco can tell from the way his shoulder jumps that he’s tapping his fingers against his thigh. 

The rest of the trial passes in a blur. Potter’s testimony outweighs the feeble ones provided by others—a couple of barely legal Ravenclaws whose anger seems to be directed more towards the Carrows and Draco’s behaviour as a Hogwarts bully. 

It’s not enough. 

But neither is Potter’s testimony enough for a full pardon. 

By the time both the barristers have concluded their arguments and Draco is released from his bonds and made to stand, Kingsley’s eyes find Draco’s again. “Before the court adjourns for today, would the accused like a word?” 

It takes Draco a minute to process the request. He feels Dench’s eyes on the back of his head. He feels the holes being burned into his body from the weighted gaze of the Wizengamot. He feels the heat of Potter’s stare. 

He thinks of refusing. 

Then he thinks—

“Yes,” he mumbles, and then louder, “Yes, please, Minister.” 

Kingsley nods, and Dench waves a Sonorus Charm at Draco’s thought. Despite it, his voice comes out feeble, starved, thready like a fading pulse. 

“I have little to say in my own defence,” Draco says. His father would not be proud of his honesty. But then again, his father is not in a courtroom full of people who are looking at him with considering eyes, weighing on a balance that will be flipped with a wrong look, a haughty tilt of the head. “But I would like to take this rare opportunity to do something I have never done before, though there has been more than enough reason.” 

He swivels his head at the painful, stretched angle required to look at Potter the best he can with his feet still shackled to the poles of the chair and says, “I would like to apologise to Harry Potter for having been a… bully and a bigot. Alongside him, I would like to extend the same apology to countless others who have been subjected to the whims and fancies and privileged rages and outright bullying of a boy who thought he owned the world. And last, but not least, I would like to… thank Harry Potter. And Luna Lovegood and Dean Thomas and Ginevra Weasley and all the others who have submitted their memories and testimonies speaking for me. I… did not… that is to say I… thank them. For it all. And regardless of the respected Wizengamot’s decision, both my apology and my gratitude stand.” 

He stops and then with a wince, adds hurriedly, “And I would like to extend another branch of my gratitude to the Minister who has ensured that I, despite not… despite not entirely being… deserving of this fair trial have received it. I… yes, thank you.” 

He closes his mouth with a snap, mortified and ashamed of his eloquence deserting him in the minutes he’s required it most. This speech, possibly his last before an audience could be the determining stroke ascertaining his future. And yet, here he is, standing in the resounding echo of a fumbled apology and an assurance that he understands he is owed nothing. 

_Father, I’m sorry._

For a second, the Wizengamot is silent. Draco feels the weight of it in his bones, the thoughts and biases of every cocked head, every shrewd eye, every analysing gaze that takes him in, from his tattered garb to his bruised arms to the way he cannot meet and hold anyone’s eyes. It doesn’t last—it’s barely a minute before the pews break into a flurry of murmured words, rapid whispering and furious scribbling. 

Somewhere a bell tolls. Draco doesn’t know if it is the ominous nature of his memory or simply a cosmic joke. He looks away, face hot, eyes burning. There is no solace to be found in faces, so he looks down at the floor. 

By the time he looks up, dregs of broken courage mustered in the clench of his palm, Kingsley’s eyes are fixed on him. It’s assessing and cool as ever, indiscriminate in its neutrality. Nothing of his veneer softens when he nods once more, another sharp jerk before banging his gavel and saying in a tenor that brooks no argument, “Court is adjourned.” 

The familiar feeling of the guard’s fingers pressing into the bruises on his shoulders drags Draco out of his reverie, then the chair, then the courtroom. 

“You’re not getting out that easy,” whispers the roughened voice he’s accustomed to by now, barked orders and spewed insults blurring into each other as the overwhelming grey of his cell threatens to breach the carefully constructed barriers of his mind. “There’s more you need to suffer for.” 

Draco agrees. When the guard pushes him forward, he sees no point in resisting. 

The cold awaits. 

**25th May, 1998**

Draco stares at Kingsley. 

The man is speaking words Draco isn’t able to process and Dench is nodding along beside him, looking serious and grave with a touch of unbearable smugness about his eyes. 

_Exile,_ he thinks, the word floating through his senses. It sounds mechanical when the voices in his ears whisper it, the grating harmony of the syllables unfamiliar. It feels like the moment when the shackles had been lifted from his hands, the weight of the surly guard’s justified anger cutting into him instead. 

It tastes like freedom and a fate Draco does not deserve. 

“Why?” 

He doesn’t realise he’s spoken until he feels the twin weight of the Minister’s stare and Dench’s wary glare. He can’t recall what they’d been talking about, but he figures it can’t have been that important given that it had been about him anyway. 

“Why?” he asks, clearing his throat. “This is… kind. Too kind.” 

Kingsley is brusque as ever. “Because punishment must fit the crime and your faults seem to be a sequence of terrible decisions made with the intention of sparing your family the Dark Lord’s heavy hand. I understand that your perspective on judgement is skewed”— he casts a significant look towards Draco’s covered left arm—“but we have made it a point to construct our systems on justice.” 

“Justice,” Draco says, the word coming out twisted and wrong. As though it’s a foreign language his mouth is not accustomed to speaking. “Justice for a Marked Death Eater.” 

“Justice for a boy who is as much a victim as anyone else from his year.” 

“You must be joking. This is some cruel joke and I shall not stand for it, I will probably be carted back in—” 

“Draco,” the Minister cuts in, unimpressed and annoyed. “We would not spend valuable Ministry resources playing petty mind games with you. And I will remind you that you are in no way getting off scot-free. The fines we demand are a significant portion of your family vaults, at least the ones the British Ministry has jurisdiction over. You will not be able to come back and sustain yourself by being a wealthy and influential philanthropist. Not to mention the hours of community service that you have to commit yourself to. They will not be easy. And a year of exile does mean that you cannot in any way or form return to Britain, not even under extenuating circumstances. You understand the implications of this, yes?” 

Draco swallows and nods. “But I… But I…” He doesn’t know how to frame it in a way that doesn’t make him sound either ungrateful or somehow delirious. “I don’t have to go back to Azkaban?” 

For the first time, Draco observes a crack in Kingsley’s facade. A chink in the armour. A flash of expression that Draco thinks is a cross between pity and sympathy, neither of which he has the pride left to reject. 

“You don’t have to go back to Azkaban,” Kingsley says. “Not for this. And the Wizengamot would appreciate you conducting yourself in a fashion befitting someone granted this kindness and not land yourself back there due to other misconduct.” 

Draco’s throat is parched and raw. 

Kingsley’s eyes soften. It’s the most he’s given Draco up until now. His words, if possible, are kinder still. “Travel,” Kingsley says. “Get out of here and see the world for what it is outside your mansion and your father’s friends and their beliefs. Take this sentence as an opportunity. You have the money, Draco. You have the time. Don’t squander it on meaningless pursuits.” 

_Exile,_ whisper the voices in Draco’s ear again. _Freedom,_ responds his heart. 

Maybe he could travel. 

—

“I don’t want to be an Auror,” Harry blurts out at the dinner table. Everyone stops talking. Percy, carrying most of the conversation with a surprisingly interesting retelling of some secretary’s complete incompetence has adopted a patently wounded expression. Ron’s fork is poised near his mouth but his eyes are fixed on Harry. Hermione doesn’t look surprised, but she does look resigned. Molly, who had been serving Ginny, looks concerned. 

“Are you alright?” Ginny asks, blunt as ever, cutting immediately to the chase. “Do you need medicine?” 

“Ginevra!” Molly says, voice rising an octave. 

“Harry’s having a crisis,” Ginny says with a shrug. “I’m just wondering if he needs something to help him through it.” 

“You don’t have to be an Auror right away,” Hermione says. “You could take a year off, figure things out for yourself, get your head on straight.” 

Across the table, Bill nods in agreement. 

“You’re young,” Percy begins tentatively. “You shouldn’t be making rash career choices—” 

“I think I’ve had enough of fighting Dark Wizards, thanks Perce,” Harry interjects, cutting off what was definitely going to devolve into a lecture about why he should at least acquire the necessary qualifications for Aurorship. 

No one can really argue with that. 

“Mate,” Ron says, quiet and a little hesitant. “We’ll support you even if you decide to become a rat breeder in the French Alps. You don’t have to worry ‘bout that.” 

Harry’s eyes flicker briefly over to Ron’s, heart pounding with gratitude. Trust his best friends to know what he’s terrified of. Trust them to reach into the aching parts of him and draw away the doubts. 

Across the table, Bill nods in agreement again. 

“I think you should just be focusing on getting some rest and eating three square meals a day,” Molly says, ladling out a pile of bangers and mash onto Bill’s plate. “I don’t care what you do as long as you stop being a bag of skin and bones.” 

“Why the sudden change of heart?” Ginny asks. “You’ve been fighting Voldemort since you were eleven, and now that he’s dead, you’re suddenly sick of it?” 

“Gin,” Harry sighs, because he knows where she’s coming from. The less impulsive part of him that’s looking for stability screams assent with the sentiment. “It’s complicated.” 

Ginny shrugs and goes back to her peas. 

“Harry—” Percy begins, but subsides from a look his father sends his way. 

And that’s that. 

Except it’s not. Later at night, Hermione and Ron are lying on either side of him in the tiny bedroom all three of them are holed up in. 

“We were supposed to be partners at the Academy together,” Ron says. There’s an undercurrent of… something there that Harry can’t quite place. 

“I know, mate, I’m sorry—” 

“Harry, I don’t care about you becoming an Auror or not,” Ron says, talking over him the minute he tries to apologise. “I’ve lost one brother, another’s been drinking and barely eating for the last month and probably won’t anytime soon. I just don’t want to lose another.” 

Harry’s heart swells with an ache so profound, he swallows against it. 

“You won’t,” he whispers, because there isn’t much else to say, really. 

“Ron and I were thinking,” Hermione says from his other side, fingers seeking his in the dark. He reaches out to clasp them with one hand, gripping Ron’s with the other. “That we should go to Australia.” 

Harry knows this. Sees the way Hermione stands apart from him and Ron when they talk to Molly, eyes distant and sad. Sees the way she can’t seem to stop crying some nights. Sees the way Ron pulls her close and mutters reassurances into her hair. 

“I thought the memory charms weren’t reversible,” Harry ventures, tentatively. Hermione’s parents in some little village of Australia are living peaceful lives away from Voldemort’s reign of terror and its subsequent fall, completely unaware of the daughter who left them there. 

“I’m not sure what they are,” Hermione admits. “I layered them on so thick that I don’t really know what their brains look like. Their thoughts, their life before they went there. But I—I don’t think I can breathe easy until I at least try.” 

Harry gets that. If there was any avenue left to bring his parents back, Harry would not leave it unexplored. 

“You should go,” he tells them. “Both of you. It would do you a world of good to just get away from here.” 

“You could come with us,” Ron says. Hermione nods against his shoulder. 

Harry hesitates. He wants to, he does, they’re his best bloody friends, for Godric’s sake. He loves them too much.

But right now, with the memories of the war so raw, with the nightmares of empty tents and cold pools with a necklace stringing him to death, Ron lying broken and bloody in the middle of a forest, the mere thought of going on a trip with them fills Harry with nervous anxiety. 

He tries to vocalise it, “I wish I could but—it’s just—with the Forest and everything else—I don’t—” 

“Oh thank Merlin,” Hermione says. 

On his other side, Ron exhales a shaky laugh. 

“What?” Harry asks, surprised and a little hurt. “Why’d you suggest it if you didn’t want me to come along?” 

Hermione laughs. “Come on, Harry, we’d rather suffer a few nightmares if you’d actually wanted to come than leave you here alone to fend for yourself.” 

“Against Percy,” Ron adds and they all groan. 

“He’s a bit better now,” Hermione says. “More interesting.” 

“You’re not allowed to find Percy interesting,” Ron says, leaning up on his elbow. “Neither of you. I’m the only interesting Weasley brother when it comes to the two of you. Especially you, Hermione. And Merlin’s saggy left ball, _Percy?_ Really?” 

“It’s not like I’m leaving you for him!” Hermione mutters, choking back giggles. 

“Dear Merlin, the bloody _thought_ of it—” 

“I agree with Ron for once, don’t even think about that—” 

Hermione’s laughing now, and Harry can’t hold his own laughter back and after a beat, Ron’s joining in. 

“Fucking Perce,” Ron says, choked off and wheezing. “ _Interesting,_ ‘Mione?” 

“Well he is!” Hermione says, throwing her hands up and knocking Harry’s glasses off his face. “Sorry Harry—but he talks more! And he doesn’t just talk about being whatever he was to the Minister’s Undersecretary—” 

“Wasn’t he the Minister’s Undersecretary—?” 

“No, that was Umbridge, shut up—” 

“How dare you bring up Umbridge in my bedroom, how dare you—” 

And they’re laughing again, rolled into each other, breathing as one. 

By the time they calm down, the only sound in the room is the ticking of someone’s watch and the breathlessness of their breathing. 

“So you don’t want to be an Auror,” Hermione says.

“No,” Harry agrees, wondering why he’d ever thought it would be a good decision to keep reliving the motions that he’s grown to associate with Voldemort. 

“You could travel,” she says after a moment. “Not to Australia,” she clarifies, before Harry can open his mouth. “Somewhere else. There’s a whole world out there and you have the vaults to make it possible. Where outside of Britain have you been?” 

“Nowhere,” Harry admits. “I’ve never been allowed.” 

“The more I hear about the Dursleys, the more I want to show up wherever they’re holed up and experiment with some of the more creative spells I’ve come across,” Hermione says, matter-of-factly. Ron snorts in agreement. “But anyway, you could go somewhere—anywhere. By yourself. Remake your memories of travelling.” 

It doesn’t sound like a half bad idea, if he’s being honest. 

“Where would I go?” he asks. 

“Throw a dart on a map,” Ron says at the same time Hermione says, “India.” 

“India?” Ron asks, baffled before saying, “Oh wait, because you’re—oh.” 

“Ronald, are you telling me you forgot—” 

“Well no—” 

“He’s right there, his skin is right there, tell me, does it look like yours?” 

“I didn’t _forget—_ ”

Harry interjects with a hurried, “I’ve always wanted to,” before the words settle into his brain and he realises the extent of the truth to them. He’s _always_ wanted to. 

The Dursleys weren’t kind about it, him being a brown-skinned boy, fucking up the whitewashed symmetry of their family. There had been multiple reasons for Vernon’s prejudices and Petunia’s rabid rage against James, and though magic had been one, the melanin hadn’t helped. 

_Filthy,_ he remembers Vernon telling Dudley once when Dudley had asked why Harry was so much darker. _His mother decided to muck about in dirt and then had him, so the stains of the pigsty can’t be washed off._

It had been the first time Harry had willingly crawled into his cupboard, unwilling to let Petunia or Vernon or fucking Dudley see his tears. 

But then he’d gone to Hogwarts and met the Patil twins who wore their bangles with pride and unabashedly perused brochures for lehengas and saris, who had asked him if he’d ever been to India and which part of it his father’s family had been from and had rushed to pacify him when he’d stuttered over the shame of not knowing the answers. 

He’d met Salma Rashid, his Mind Healer after the war who had explained cognitive dissonance and self-destructive patterns and PTSD to him in a measured, calm tone that instantly put him at ease. Who had not batted an eyelash when Harry had broken down and asked her one day after some Muggles in London had made comments about his skin that drove him back to his cupboard and Vernon’s smirking derision, to the shame of not knowing where his father was from or the names of his grandparents, how she stomached the way he knew people must stare at her hijab. 

_I know it’s not the same,_ he’d told her. _But when do the stares stop hurting?_

 _When you stop hating what they stare at_ , Salma had said. 

It had stuck with him. 

Now, with Hermione’s hand stroking through his hair and the weight of Ron’s head on his shoulder, it comes back to him. The shame is still there, bitter as bile, but it’s overpowered by something so close to hope that Harry thinks he might choke on the sweetness of its fragrance. 

“If you’ve always wanted to go, you should,” Ron says. “Take a year, hell, take more off and just. I don’t know, what do people do when they go back to their country?” 

Hermione tenses beside him but Harry doesn’t want to argue. “Britain is my country,” he reminds Ron. 

“Well, yeah, of course,” Ron says, brow furrowed. “Why wouldn’t it be? You’re as British as it gets, mate. But part of you’s Indian, isn’t it? Even if it’s just the skin for now. Maybe it could be more. You won’t know until you go.” 

Hermione relaxes. Harry stares up at the darkened ceiling. 

Maybe he could travel.


	2. Chapter 2

_“What if we joined our wildernesses together?’ Sit with that for a minute.”  
—Ross Gay, Joy Is Such A Human Madness_

They run into each other in Knockturn of all places because Harry’s luck is nothing if not antagonistically fickle. 

It doesn’t even happen elegantly—a touch on the shoulder, a glance across the narrow street, a gaze caught and released quickly through the tinted glass of a suspect shop window. It happens as most things do between them—explosively, messily, with a whole bunch of broken glass and creative profanities. In the aftermath of Harry and Malfoy, there is always a wreckage. 

Harry stares down at where his latest purchase of Gillyweed is rolling merrily into the gutter. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Malfoy’s surprised face go from neutral to increasingly horrified as he takes in the detritus of Harry’s last-minute shopping spree. 

Thinking of all the side-eyes he’d received from curious fellow customers and wary shopkeepers when he’d stepped in without bothering with Glamours, Harry sighs. The idea of having to repeat the process from start to finish is repulsively unappealing. While what he bought at Knockturn was technically legal but unsavoury enough for Diagon to not provide for, there are definitely things on the dusty shelves of the secluded shops that Harry would rather go the rest of his life without encountering again. He bends to salvage what he can, wand sparking with an eagerness to fix the broken glass when Malfoy’s voice tears him out of his thoughts.

“I’ll pay,” Malfoy says, words coming in a hurried rush. His face is pale and his eyes are wide. “I wasn’t looking and I can’t make up for your lost time, but whatever you—I’ll compensate.” 

“What?” Harry says, dumbfounded and floundering in the face of a Malfoy who has reacted to the situation so contrarily from what Harry had expected of him that it’s laughably ridiculous. “No, why would you— _I_ was the one who wasn’t looking, I was lost in thought—Malfoy, what?” 

Malfoy looks away, an uncomfortable blush rising high on his cheekbones. “I leave tomorrow, Potter,” he says. “I don’t want any trouble before that. I’ll pay for your things and we’ll be on our way.” He swallows and repeats, “I don’t want any trouble.”

Harry stares at him bewildered. 

“Leave?” 

“Yes, I must—the sentence—a year of exile—” He’s beginning to look like a puffed up kitten and that at least, is familiar territory. “Is _any_ of this ringing a bell for you Potter?” 

Oh. Malfoy’s sentence. Half his vaults expunged of contents to be used in the rebuilding efforts, five thousand hours of community service and a year spent in exile. He’d been given a grace period of two weeks to get his affairs in order, but it makes sense that he’s leaving tomorrow. The first of the month. 

New beginnings and all that. 

“I leave tomorrow too,” Harry says before he realises that he’s talking. “Hence all the…” He gestures towards the jumbled mess of broken things between them. “Don’t worry about the expenses, I was being rather careless. You could have been anyone.” 

Malfoy’s sharp jaw bunches. His grey gaze turns cooler than it had been, thawing ice freezing up again. “Well then,” he says, shrugging. “Best be on my way. Good day, Potter. Nice talk.” 

Malfoy bypasses him with a graceful tilt of his sloping shoulders to avoid bumping into Harry again. Harry doesn’t know what propels him to say the next words, but they come out anyway, lingering in the musty air of Knockturn. 

“Come for a drink with me.” 

Malfoy pauses. His hands are stuffed into the pockets of his trench coat, pale wrists a sliver of vulnerability between the unforgiving stretches of dark fabric. The line of his back is rigid and tense, as though Harry’s words have triggered dual responses within him, his body and his mind pulling in opposite directions as he struggles to settle on one. He looks like something out of a historical fiction graphic novel, the ominously flickering lights of the alley throwing his profile into dramatic shadows. He turns partway to look over his shoulder without straining his neck at an awkward angle and Harry recognises the light of curious concern in his partially visible eyes. 

“Are you feeling well, Potter?” 

“Yes,” Harry says, wondering why people keep asking him that. He’s not a child, he’s allowed to make whatever decisions he pleases. “Yeah, I. Since we’re both leaving and all. It might be best to have a drink and—” He scrubs a hand over his face. “Leave the past in the past.” 

Malfoy turns the rest of the way. He’s facing Harry fully, and his posture is wary. His expression is carefully neutral, the corners of his lips twitching with repressed emotion. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Potter,” he says, haltingly. There’s an uncertainty in his face Harry is all too familiar with from watching Hermione puzzle out responses to questions she doesn’t immediately know the answer to. “I’m not… welcome in most places a man like you might find suitable for a drink.” 

Whatever had risen in Harry’s chest resembling hope sinks. “A man like me?” he asks, voice bitter and tone harsh. Of course Malfoy is still a prejudiced prat. Of course he’s still a biased fuck—

Malfoy’s eyes narrow as though Harry is the one being difficult before his expression smooths out again. His next words startle the indignation out of Harry. “You happen to be a hero among men,” Malfoy says, and Harry recognises the effort it must take Malfoy to get the words out. He looks pained. “I am… a scorned Death Eater.” It’s true, but the expression that flickers over Malfoy’s face is horribly reminiscent of the haunted look Sirius had worn when he’d been relegated to his new prison of Grimmauld Place. “Whatever establishment suits your fancy will probably be far less accommodating to a man like me.” 

Oh. 

Relief brings a grin back to Harry’s face, small but sure. This isn’t prejudice, this is understandable cowardice. This is Malfoy not wanting to get hexed, which is simultaneously familiar and deeply unfamiliar given Malfoy’s penchant to say the exact things that grated enough on Harry’s nerves for his magic to itch for a fight. So he says in a voice as amicable as he can make it, “Not the Muggle ones.” 

Now Malfoy looks as though Harry has lost his damn mind and that’s _definitely_ familiar ground. 

“Come on, Malfoy,” Harry pleads. He isn’t sure why he’s here, pleading with Malfoy to join him for a drink. If it weren’t so absurd, it would probably be a little pathetic. But absurd is better than the predictable routines Harry is trying his best to avoid, and if Malfoy is the ticket to an interesting evening, Harry will take it. At fifteen, Harry would have scoffed at the idea of spending anything remotely close to a ‘pleasant evening’ with Malfoy. At seventeen, the prospect is almost mellow. “I’ve been making impulsive decisions all week. What’s one more?” 

Malfoy tilts his head at a considering angle. Harry’s pulse thuds. “One drink?” 

“One drink,” Harry promises. 

“Might as well,” he mutters in his posh accent, flicking his gaze back down towards where Harry’s shattered purchases are still rolling on the ground. 

With a flick of his wand, Harry Vanishes the mess. “I’ll buy everything again after we’ve had the drink,” Harry promises Malfoy, who has begun to look apologetic and unfamiliar again. “It’ll hold us to sobriety. And,” he adds, because he doesn’t trust Malfoy’s proclivities to throw money around to not resurge, “I still don’t expect you to pay for that mess.” 

“I have no Muggle money on me,” Malfoy says, a little redundantly, because Harry wasn’t intending to let him spend it even if he did have it on his person. Harry takes a step away from him in the direction of the doorway that leads to Muggle London, unwilling to spend longer standing about in Knockturn.

“My treat,” he calls over his shoulder and wonders what precisely he’s gotten himself into when Malfoy falls into step behind him. 

—

Potter is an enigma. 

Somewhere between killing the Dark Lord and ordering beers at the counter of a small but cosy pub in Shoreditch, the open book of his existence has slammed shut. The glimpses Draco catches of the man beneath the veneer of cheerful chivalry seem to be in a different language from the one Draco is fluent in. 

It’s more disconcerting than he’s willing to admit. 

At the trial, he’d been too preoccupied with the thoughts of returning to Azkaban and the sheer surprise of having Potter champion his defence. Now, as he watches Potter make his way back to their table in the corner, drinks balanced on a tray, Draco can’t help but think he’s missed something significant. 

Potter still wears glasses—Draco wouldn’t know what to do if he stopped wearing glasses—and the eyes behind them are just as intense as they’ve ever been throughout the years in Hogwarts. But every time Draco catches Potter off guard as he looks off to the side, or forgets that he’s in company, something simmers beneath that carefully curated persona. Draco has to hold himself back from shaking him by the shoulders until whatever is out of place snicks back into the familiar order of Potter. 

He tries not to think too much about the possibility that the transformation is permanent. 

“Malfoy,” Potter says now, placing the drinks down on their table. “Where to?” 

Draco shrugs. 

Potter raises his beer mug and an eyebrow. “A year isn’t a trifle, Malfoy. You can’t just wander off beyond the border without a plan and blink at the sun.” 

Draco scowls because Potter always knows how to hit the nail on the head even when he doesn’t know he’s holding a hammer. “We have villas,” he says. “One in France, another in Italy. We have some property down in South Africa too—” 

“That’s the plan is it? Hole yourself up on some hill in a garden full of roses and come back a year later, all posh and sneery when faced with us common folk?” 

Draco scowls. That’s not—that’s hardly—

That’s _exactly_ what he’d planned on doing. And now that Potter says it, in that derisive, slightly mocking tone, with a small smirk curling his full lips, it seems foolish and selfish in a way that indicates he has learned nothing. 

_And if you don’t do something with this grotesque, undeserved, pathetic life of yours, I’m going to end it with my bare hands._

He startles at the echo of Ginevra’s voice in his head, the sharpness of her words, the precise nature of her delivery. Come to think of it, spending his year of exile in France, being coddled by his mother’s elves does seem futile. Disappointment smells of the familiarity of his mother’s perfume and the sharp tang of beer as he meets Potter’s eyes across the table.

An opportunity, Kingsley had called it. A hideaway, Draco had taken it to mean. 

“You look like you’re having an existential crisis,” Potter observes mildly. The foam of his beer has found its way onto his upper lip. He licks it off and spreads his hands out on the table in a throwaway gesture of _do-what-you-want._ “It’s your life Malfoy.” 

“I don’t know what to do,” Draco blurts before his pride or his insecurities can kick in. Once the words are out, they hang heavy in the fraught air between them, a quiet admission of weakness that’s both unexpected and unknown. Draco has been weak in front of Potter before. Sixth year is a battleground of tense memories—Potter seeing him cry, Potter watching horrified as Draco spurted blood from the sliced gash across his abdomen, lying helpless and weak on the floor, Potter watching him lower his shaking wand on the tower. But these intrusions have never been of Draco’s own volition. 

This one—a desperate plea, a rushed declaration breaking down the middle—is. 

Potter’s silent for a while. Behind his spectacles, his eyes are unreadable. After quiet moments, he raises his mug in a toast and says, “More in common than I thought at first.” 

“You said you were leaving,” Draco says, suddenly uncomfortable and frantically searching for a change in the subject. “Where are you going?” 

It’s Potter’s turn to shrug. “Anywhere. Everywhere. I was kind of hoping to land up at some point in India, but not right away.” 

“India?” 

Potter cocks a brow and Draco flushes. “Do you have family there?” The attempt to make up for the insensitivity of his comment falls a little flat but Potter takes it at face value and shrugs again. 

“No clue. Nothing I have of my dad’s indicates he knew about any family there. I don’t even know which state my family’s from,” he says. The curve of his mouth tilts downwards. It’s a little bitter, a little resigned, but his words are dry. “It’s all very murky and mysterious.” 

Draco raises his own glass of whisky to his lips and takes a swig. The Muggle drink is refreshing in a way the potent burn of Firewhisky isn’t.

“There are probably spells and charms—” 

“None of which I’m interested in,” Potter interjects sharply. Draco looks up at him in surprise. “If I go to India, it won’t be to find a family who doesn’t know me, who might not be able to… accept me. If I go, it’s going to be to see the place. Take it in. Thrive for a few months without being stared at for this,” he says, gesturing to his arms. “Or this,” he adds, pointing up at his scar. 

Draco nods because he thinks he understands. “I was thinking Italy,” he ventures of his own surprised accord. “The Dark Lord’s tendrils didn’t extend into Italy quite as much. The Government was exceptionally resistant. They won’t care quite as much about this,” he says, twitching his left forearm. 

He pretends to not flinch away from Potter’s brief moue of revulsed disgust. 

_Filthy little Death-Eater._

The drink almost comes back up, but Potter’s expression smooths over before the mood can sour further. “You will have to come back to Britain,” he says, voice giving away none of his true thoughts on the subject of Draco’s Mark though Draco is certain any of his harsher guesses will land close enough. “People will care here.” 

“I am hoping I might be more than just this by then,” Draco says, the honesty burning its way through his system. It’s a direction he has forced himself to take, even when his honed instincts scream at him to toss enough Galleons in the right direction and make all of this nasty stuff go away. He won’t be his father. 

“You’re planning on becoming more in your Italian villa, Malfoy?” 

And there is it again, the mocking derision. Draco’s temper flares hot. 

“Would you shut up about my damn villa?” he hisses over the table, taking a little morsel of sick pleasure in the way Harry jerks back. “I can’t help the fact that my father decided property in Siena would be somehow lucrative. He wasn’t wrong, anyway.” 

“Sure,” Potter says, recovering quickly, mouth twisting into a little snarl. “Your father wasn’t wrong about _property._ ” 

The unsaid words, _he was wrong about pretty much everything else_ hang between them like the blade of a guillotine.

The rage vanishes from his system as instantaneously as it had encroached upon his senses in the first place. What’s the point of being angry in the face of truth? What’s the point driving a stake into a brick wall? 

He lets his shoulders slump. “I don’t know where else to go,” he says instead because Slytherins keep secrets when there is a price to be paid for their revelations. Draco is worthless now. “I told you, I don’t know what to do.” 

“Come with me,” Potter says. Draco’s neck almost snaps with the speed at which he jerks it upwards to stare incredulously at Potter. 

Potter himself goes through a complicated series of emotions. At first he seems as surprised by his own words as Draco. Then horrified, which makes more sense. Then thoughtful which veers into delighted and eventually settles on determined. 

“What did you say?” Draco asks because no other words are left within his brain. 

“I asked you to come with me. For your year of banishment. Or let me come with you, or whatever.” 

“Why the actual fuck—” 

Potter considers when Draco trails off, spluttering. “I’m not sure,” he admits. 

“You don’t even like me!” Draco feels the need to point out. “You hate me, we—we hate each other, it’s a thing. And now what, you want to go backpacking across the continent with me—?” 

Potter looks rather interested. “I didn’t know you had that in mind,” he says. 

Draco throws his hands up because there seems to be no other expression that fits the reality he must have slipped into when he wasn’t looking. “I don’t! I don’t know what I have in mind, I just said that because—because—because that’s probably what Gryffindors do.” 

Potter looks a little rueful. “You’re not even wrong,” he says, taking another sip of beer. “‘But I’m not interested in anything of the sort.” 

“So what—” 

Potter looks at him, head cocked a little thoughtfully. “You’re not disagreeing.” 

“Of course I’m disagreeing!” Draco says. “This is me, disagreeing. Not agreeing. Never agreeing to your absolutely bollocks plan to hang out together for a year! Is that what you want, Potter? For the kind Minister to find our bloated bodies in the English Channel and for the coroner to say that we’ve died by each other’s hand? Is that it, Potter—” 

He stops talking because Potter is laughing. And oh, _oh,_ Potter looks _good_ when he laughs. Draco can almost see the transformation of him in the full-bodied laughter, his armour falling away, his ghosts disappearing. He looks like a boy, and Draco bites down hard on his lip to keep his thoughts from coasting the dangerous shores of the thoughts that invade his headspace when he thinks about beautiful boys.

Sitting across from him, drink in hand, laughing in a way that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with mockery or animosity or unkind one-upping but instead genuine mirth, Harry Potter is nothing short of beautiful. It’s an underwhelming adjective but there is nothing more appropriate for the understated gloriousness of Potter’s dark curls bouncing with the slight shakes of his head, the scrunched up corners of his eyes. A lot about Potter’s persona is loud because it needs to be. But this Potter is steadier, quieter and Draco wonders what it might mean that the parts of him still shrieking from the horrors of Azkaban and Voldemort quiet for a moment as the sound of Potter’s laughter drowns out the sounds of agonised screams.

His mind is not safe, but it is still private, and he wonders in the most secluded crevices of it what it means to feel those flutters in the depths of his stomach at the sight of Potter’s broad shoulders shaking. 

“Stop,” he grumbles, because he doesn’t know what else might escape his errant mouth should he let it run loose. He takes a bracing drink of whisky to keep himself from twisting his thoughts into words. 

“I don’t want our bodies to wash up on the shores of the Channel, no,” Potter says, wiping at the corners of his eyes. His words are warmer now. “But I don’t have anything to do for at least a year Malfoy. Might as well join you and make sure you’re doing what you’re supposed to.” 

He’s probably supposed to be offended by the words. But the delivery of them, light and tinged with humour makes it impossible to hold a grudge. He’s unwilling to let himself contemplate how many of the ones he’d held at Hogwarts would have evaporated if Potter had shown him this side of him, had aimed this laughter at _him_ instead of Weasley and Granger.

It’s a selfish thought, but it’s normal at the very least. Jealousy is familiar. 

“What is it I’m supposed to do?” he asks instead. 

Potter traces the rim of his mug with a finger. Draco chokes back the thoughts of him using his pointer finger in that detached, exploratory expression on other—

“Learn,” he says, finally. Draco finds himself the startled recipient of the full weight of Potter’s stare. “Change, grow, whatever. Rehabilitate. Not be… who you were.” 

Draco smiles a little. Knocks back the rest of his whisky. “I don’t want Muggles or Muggle-borns dead, Potter, thank you. You needn’t worry.” 

“There’s a difference between tolerance and acceptance,” Potter says and the words stop Draco short. “And I saw you when you entered this place. You looked… surprised. That a Muggle place wasn’t whatever you imagined it to be, overrun with filth and dogs and falling to pieces.” 

He’s right and Draco’s whole face flames hot at the knowledge that he’s been read so accurately. 

“I saved you,” Potter says bluntly. “Over and over. The flames. Begging all those corresponding testimonies off of Hermione and Ron and Ginny. Dean and Luna were more than willing, but some of the people whose memories are included in your Pensieve were less than willing to help a bloke who called them names all throughout school, hexed them in the hallways, turned them over to Umbridge. My testimony itself, though more than one person objected to me standing up for you.” 

“I didn’t ask—” 

“No,” Potter says, steadily. “You didn’t ask for any of that. But Malfoy, you’re smart. You fixed that messed-up Vanishing Cabinet stuff in your sixth year, when the complications of that shit would have flown over practically everyone’s heads except maybe Hermione and Padma from our year. You’re… capable of good. What happened at the Manor, what happened with the Carrows, all of that points to you being more than a Slytherin bully. And what world did we save if a boy my age lands up in Azkaban for life with half his soul sucked out and people like Rita Skeeter are allowed to roam the streets with no consequence?” 

Draco knows his mouth has fallen open. He knows it’s ungainly. But Potter is—Potter seems to be genuine. And he’s still talking. 

“But then again, what’s the point of all that potential either if you’re going to waste it holed up in a villa?” 

Draco blinks. “So you want to come with me to… what? Teach me humanity?” 

Potter’s smile is quick and heartbreaking in its accessible ease. Draco can only ever dream of such an expression coming easily to him. His smiles are twisted with mockery even when he doesn’t intend them to be. Potter’s lips are dark and when they curve in a smile, the perfect cupid’s bow of them stretches out in a warm glide. “A mentor if you will.” 

“Fuck off,” Draco says, because there’s only so much of Potter he can handle.

“A guide, Malfoy, why don’t you seem excited—” 

“Potter, I swear to Salazar.” 

“Alright, alright” Potter says, lifting his hands in a gesture of surrender. His palms are broad, Draco notices. He’s wearing a slightly clunky watch around his right wrist and his heart line is particularly deep, visible clearly all the way across the table. “I want to come because I don’t know where I’m supposed to be going and I’m scared that I’m going to find out my drive to leave this place only lasts fifteen minutes because the rest of the world is too big and I’ve never been…” he shrugs, “Anywhere, really. If you let me come, it would help keep us both on track.” 

Draco thinks he understands. 

“Where would we go?” he asks. 

Potter looks thoughtful again. “We could split the trip,” he says. “Go somewhere you want. And go somewhere I want. Six months each.” 

A year seems longer when it’s broken up into months. 

One year, Draco has been telling himself. 

Twelve months, Potter tells him. It’s jarring.

“I want to go to Italy,” he says. “Tuscany. Maybe Florence. Maybe Rome.” 

“Because they won’t care about this?” Potter asks, gesturing to his own forearm, echoing Draco’s words from earlier in the evening. 

Draco sighs. “Not so much that as… we went once, when I was six. Mother, Father and I. I just want to… see the place again.” He looks away. “We were happy,” he mumbles, unsure how the words will be received. Have courage, Draco. Speak the truth.

When he looks back at Potter, Potter’s smiling. “Something real, then,” he says and the words are drenched in bittersweet surprise. 

“Where do you want to go?” Draco counters because he doesn’t like to dwell on his decisions. Potter shrugs. 

“Already told you. India. I’ve been looking and Delhi, maybe. Mumbai. A place called Calcutta in the East. More, if time permits.” 

“Backpacking across Asia would have been more accurate,” Draco says, drily. Potter laughs. It’s smaller and less intense, but as genuine as the last one, suffusing Draco with warmth. 

“Deal, Malfoy?” he asks. “Six months in Italy, six months in India, a year together?” He slides his hand across the table, expression expectant. Draco stares at it, registering distantly that he’s supposed to be shaking it. 

“Six months of my history, another six of yours,” Draco responds slowly. Something in Potter’s expression darkens and then clears. Draco clears his throat. Slides his own hand across the table to grip Potter’s. It’s warm and a little dry and his prior observation of Potter’s palms being large is reaffirmed so heavily that Draco’s brain fizzes and sparks like a hex before his senses acquiesce to stop making an absolute fool of him. 

“Deal,” he says, and wonders how he’s supposed to pretend for a year that Potter’s smiles don’t set him on fire.


	3. Chapter 3

_“And I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”  
—Emily Dickinson_

The next morning, Malfoy can barely meet Harry’s eye. 

“Is something wrong?” Harry asks, frustrated by the fifth time Malfoy opens his mouth and shuts it again before saying anything. He looks tense, on constant edge and it’s grating on Harry’s nerves. 

“No,” Malfoy says. 

And then he does it again. 

Harry turns on him where they’re sitting, waiting at the Portkey office, behind five other bleary-eyed witches and wizards. “If you have something to say, spit it out,” he says, patience wearing thin. 

Malfoy clenches his jaw. Looks away, looks back down at his hands. “I was merely curious about whether you might have changed your mind.” 

“About?” Harry asks, flabbergasted. 

“Whatever hair potions you use, obviously,” Malfoy snaps. “Merlin, Potter, don’t be a daft git. About doing this—this thing. With me.” 

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Harry asks, growing increasingly more confused. “Why would I have changed my mind and then shown up?” 

Malfoy turns away. “You’re a Gryffindor,” he says as though that explains anything. 

“I’m a Gryffindor, not a self sacrificing lunatic,” Harry says. 

Malfoy arches a brow. “Arguably that’s the—” 

“It’s really not.” 

Malfoy smiles. It’s small and a little reserved, but undeniably present. Harry wants to see more of it. 

“We discussed this,” he says, aiming to reassure. Apparently he fucks up because Malfoy’s face goes all complicated. 

“Over drinks,” he says in an odd, high voice. 

“One beer,” Harry says. “I might be seventeen but it takes more than that to get me drunk, Malfoy. This wasn’t some drunk impulse.” 

Malfoy’s eyes are so grey. Overcast skies and the sound of rain, Harry’s favourite jumper and the comfort of winter sunshine. It’s thrilling in ways irises should not be. 

“I’m glad,” Malfoy says, quiet and honest. After last night, it’s not as unfamiliar as it once would have been. 

Harry thinks he might be too. 

—

San Gimignano is sunny in June. 

Draco’s trekking up the slight incline of the cobblestone pathway, Potter a couple steps behind him. The sun, an orb of harsh glory, reigning across an azure blue sky, beats down on their backs. Only the Cooling Charms Draco has to keep casting periodically keeps him from melting into a puddle of sweat-slicked exhaustion into the cracks between the stones his boots are catching on. 

“This place looks like something out of a history book,” Draco hears behind him. Potter’s voice is a little awe-struck and a little delighted and Draco rejoices internally. Moreover, Potter’s not wrong. There are plenty of towns like this smattered all over Europe, but this little one, poised at a height, overlooking the gentle simplicity of the Tuscan countryside, seems to retain some of the old-world nostalgia of its genesis. 

“Goes back to the Medieval times,” Draco says, gesturing towards the archways. “The Muggle parts attract tourists from all over. The wizarding part is smaller, more reserved. The Malfoy villa is there.” 

“Why here?” Potter asks. It doesn’t seem redundant the way Theo’s questions often were if Draco went off on a tangent about his slight history obsession. The words, guileless and curious, are filled with Potter’s brand of earnest genuineness that sets Draco’s teeth on edge and his soul at rest. 

“A branch of the main family got a little tired of the Dark Arts that the main branch kept dabbling in and settled here. Pretty enough to be regal, small enough to be secluded. Simple enough for the Malfoys to reign like wealthy lords.” 

“So you have family here?” Potter asks, wonder and mild alarm seeping into his tone. Draco snorts. 

“No,” he says. “This branch of the Malfoy line was wiped out during the Italian Wizarding War of 1876. None of them survived. Plenty of rumours around about how precisely it happened. Some say they were spies. Some say the family splintered within itself and everyone killed each other. Father always said it wasn’t as scandalous as the Malfoy line likes to maintain it is. He said they were ambushed in the middle of the night in a raid and all of them were too drunk to fight back.” 

Potter laughs, a low and rich sound, different from the previous evening’s mildly tipsy mirth but thrilling nevertheless. After a few seconds, which is nowhere near enough time for Draco to revel in the overwhelming warmth of it, he cuts himself off. Draco turns to see him standing in the middle of the street looking positively mortified. “Sorry,” he says, eyes wide, lower lip caught between his white teeth. “You told me that and I started laughing, that’s so insensitive—” 

Draco smiles, unable to hold back the genuine fondness cutting through the layers of his complicated emotions for Potter. “I laughed when Father told me,” he says and tries not to let Potter’s evident relief bury its claws too deep in his heart. “He stared at me for a minute, wondering if I’d stop and then started laughing himself. It’s not meant to be a tragedy, though I’m sure Domizio Malfoy would disagree.” 

Potter’s uncertain smile in response is successful in its cruelly insistent endeavour to twist its way into Draco’s chest. 

He turns back towards the looming archway in front of them. 

“This part’s a bit like entering Platform Nine and Three-Quarters from Muggle London,” he says, gesturing forward. “You go through this arch right here and then you need to focus. There’s another arch, two feet in front of this one, but the Muggles can’t see it because it’s Glamoured. You need a magical core to enter it.” He watches Potter nod and says, “I’m going to disappear into thin air.” 

The little half-smirk Potter sends his way is enough to kick his heart into overdrive. When Potter says, “I’ll find you anyway,” Draco turns away and tries not to blush. 

—

Malfoy’s villa is… exactly what Harry envisioned it to be when Malfoy had first taken it upon himself to mention having property in Italy. It’s imposing in the way Harry suspects all Malfoy properties are, an isolated structure rendered in stone, untouchable and proud. 

But Harry’s memories of the Manor are tainted in grey and black, in Hermione’s screams and Voldemort’s cold smile and red eyes. Every time Harry thinks of the Manor, rain drowns his memory of it in a fevered deluge, falling in heavy sheets, obscuring all but the forbidding iron wrought gates that led to the gravel driveway. 

This villa is the opposite. The sun shines down on the limestone carvings above the arched windows, glinting off the regal white exterior of the building. Ivy twines its way around the girth of magnificently carved pillars that lead to an ornate doorway which seems to indicate the act of gaining entry to be more stately an affair than Harry has ever considered it to be. 

It screams money, but not the gaudy kind, the quiet kind that is made under tables and behind closed doors, the kind that hides in gilt-edged frames of ancestors and is used to pay off wands and mouths alike to do dirty bidding. 

It’s criminally impressive and Harry can’t quite decide whether he hates it or loves it, so he settles on a combination of both. 

The house can’t have more than two floors, but it makes up for it in the sprawling decadence of its setting, stretching on both sides with the careless grace of an aristocrat’s brainchild. Upon closer inspection, the carvings appear to be of floral motifs and delicately chiselled leaves. The magic of it blooms under Harry’s questing palm, a closed stone rosebud blossoming against the white wall. 

“It’s something, isn’t it?” Malfoy asks, quiet pride in his voice. Harry will never understand this personal pride in something created by distant family generations ago. But Draco Malfoy is everything Harry hasn’t been raised to be—a scion, an heir. Looking at him now, in his dark robes, his elegant posture and his carefully discreet way demeanour that seems almost natural, Harry can’t help but think of him as a little prince. 

He has never been able to admire arrogance, but there is a quiet reverence in Malfoy’s gaze as he sweeps it over the marble steps and the stained glass of the upper storey windows that renders him speechless as he watches. The villa is indeed something, but Malfoy on his terrain, comfortable and kingly is something else entirely. 

_Is this the weight of legacy?_

Harry has his own legacy, a vault full of money, a face he cannot claim to have worn first for its striking resemblance to a man he never knew, eyes that give him away as his mother’s son. But it’s one of bravery and love, of sacrifice so great that Harry resents it just as deeply as he is grateful to it. It’s a legacy of blood and death and ferocity, Gryffindor to its core.

This is… vastly different. 

“Shall we enter?” Malfoy asks, turning towards him so suddenly that Harry jumps. Set against the backdrop of the ivy and the pale pillars, he looks less human and more artwork, a watercolour painting of old money and the weight of a name. An artist’s canvas, Harry thinks, experimented on with the shades of dappled summer sunlight and royalty.

“Oh—er. Yes, yes of course,” he stutters, trying to coalesce his winding thoughts into spoken English. He sounds a little stupid but figures Malfoy is accustomed to it. Probably expects it. He doesn’t feel quite as unbalanced when he mentally adjusts to the status quo. 

Malfoy strides forward, purposeful and poised, feet striking the marble heel first. It makes a soft thudding sound that Harry focuses on to keep himself steady. 

Malfoy waits on the doorstep and Harry wonders why, and when an old, gnarled elf rivalling Kreacher in leathery weariness opens the door to peer up at the visitors, wonders why it hadn’t occurred to him that a prince would have servants. 

The elf stares up at them, eyes wide and ears perked and says in a tremulous voice, thick with an Italian accent, “Is Master Malfoy truly being here or is Gianni being seeing things in his old age?” 

Whatever Harry had expected of Malfoy, it hadn’t been what he immediately proceeds to do, which is smile bright enough to rival the sun at its best and bend down to lift the squawking elf into his arms and spin him around. 

“Tell me if this is real or not, Gianni,” Malfoy says, wild laughter curled into the spaces between his words. 

“Gianni is believing his eyes! And Gianni is asking Master to put him down right this minute,” the elf croaks, tiny hands coming up to press against his ears. 

Harry has never heard an elf sound that happy save for when Dobby had acquired his tea cosy hat. 

Malfoy dutifully puts the elf down after a moment and the disoriented creature blinks twice before bowing deep enough to touch his nose to the ground. 

“Gianni is welcoming young master and young master’s friend to the House of Malfoy,” he says. “It is being an honour.” 

“Gianni, this is Harry Potter,” Malfoy says, smoothly stepping over the threshold. “We’ll be staying here for a while, now.” 

“I will have the Blue Room made up for the young masters,” the elf says, bowing again, nose scraping the ground. 

For some reason, Malfoy’s face flames red. 

“N-no,” he splutters, eyes wide. “It’s not like that!” 

The elf tilts his head to one side. The innocently large blue eyes do absolutely nothing to conceal a strange mirth bubbling in them. 

Coughing delicately, the elf says, “Red Room?” 

Now Malfoy is beet red. The pink of his cheeks is stretching down, disappearing under the collar of his robes. Harry wonders for a split second just how far that flush stretches before shaking his head at himself in mute horror. 

“The Menagerie for Potter and the Curtained Room for me, Gianni, thank you,” Malfoy says, primly. 

Harry finds his voice and asks, “Why not the Blue Room?” 

Malfoy looks away, eyes fixed on a portrait frame on the far wall. “It’s the master bedroom, specially designed for—er. Couples. My parents stayed there, during our time here.” 

All of a sudden Harry understands the flush. The stammering. He thinks he might mirror it if he doesn’t get a hold of himself. For once, his colouring will do him some favours, hiding the ferocity of it were it to happen. 

“A-and the Red Room?” His voice comes out in an embarrassingly high squeak. 

“Specially designed, yet again,” says the elf who is still standing there. Harry looks towards him and wonders if all Italian elves have salacious smiles when they are enjoying some private jokes at their guest’s expense. “For unmarried couples.” 

“We are not a couple,” Harry says, feeling the heat of his own blush creeping down his face from his ears. “Whatever—whatever Malfoy suggested will do, thank you.” 

Malfoy clears his throat. The elf bows again and says, “As the young masters are wishing.” 

A tiny, traitorous part of Harry’s brain wonders what it would be like to share a room with Malfoy. 

—

The Curtained Room had been one of Draco’s favourite places to loiter in as a child. When he’d been here as a child, he’d slept in the adjoining child’s nursery as his parents had shared the large, downy mattress of the Blue Room’s opulent bed. But the Curtained Room had been the one he’d played in all day when they weren’t traipsing through the streets of San Gimignano to visit the vineyards on the outskirts. 

It’s large—every room of this villa is large and spacious, uncluttered by furniture or vanity—and the honey-gold of the sunlight poured into it lingers long into the evening. It gets its name from the large curtains hanging from the pelmets of the gorgeous floor-to-ceiling windows, embroidered by a Malfoy ancestor’s painstaking hand. 

As a child, Draco had wrapped himself up in those curtains, pretending they were draperies. Sitting on the floor, the soft fabric of legends told in art caressing him, Italian sunlight bathing his surroundings in golden light, Draco had thought he’d found heaven. He’d woven countless stories, adventures and tales about the people he saw in them, knights and statues and long-haired women and creatures that looked like woodland nymphs. He’d been the hero in all of them, and now, in the idyllic room left to him by fanciful ancestors, Draco knows why it had been so easy. 

_A hero_ , he thinks, bitterly, throwing his duffel down on the bed. _A fantasy._

There’s a knock and he looks up, startled. “Come in,” he calls, certain it’s Potter because the elves are not in the habit of knocking. 

It is Potter. He enters, looking entirely unsure of himself, hands shoved into the pockets of the Muggle trousers he insists on wearing, boots scuffing the floor. 

“I found the Menagerie,” he says, unnecessarily, but Draco isn’t paying attention. 

The sunlight finds Potter, as light almost always seems to, and weaves itself in a delightful frolic through his messy hair, twisting into his appearance like a halo. The light bounces off his spectacles, obscuring the green of his eyes. The line of his shoulders appears starker here, set against the background of Draco’s open door and the sliver of the wooden walls of the corridor visible outside. 

Draco notices, not for the first time today, how good Potter’s burgundy jumper looks on him.

“Are you listening?” Potter asks, and Draco is startled out of his reverie. 

“Sorry,” he says, as gracefully as he can. His voice breaks on the word. “I was distracted. I thought I saw something behind you.” 

Potter turns, his torso twisting, showing off the lines of his criminally trim waist and the way the jumper hugs his sides. “Nothing,” he says, turning back. “Probably an elf.” 

Draco swallows and nods. 

“You were saying?” 

“I found the Menagerie,” he says. “It’s beautiful.” 

“This branch of the family had an obsession with exotic birds,” Draco says by way of explanation for what Potter must have found in his room. “Hence, the…” 

“The bathroom has soap embossed with a quail motif,” Potter says and Draco is startled yet again, this time into laughter.

“That’s an image,” he says. 

“I could show you,” Potter says. 

It’s innocent, said as nonchalantly as possible. And yet, Draco can feel the tips of his ears burning. The thought of activities that might for some reason lead to him using Potter’s bathroom—

He clears his throat. “It’s been a day, Potter, how about lunch?” 

Potter shrugs and looks around. “I could eat. Not famished, but as you said, it’s been a day.” 

Draco nods and tries to steer clear of the line of his thought that seems to fixate on the combination of Potter and eating in the same sentence. 

—

“It’s my birthday in five days,” Malfoy says. They’re drinking wine, sitting in the drawing room which is a cosily minimalistic affair done in cream and gold. Malfoy has loosened the top two buttons of the shirt he wears underneath his robes which he lost sometime earlier in the afternoon. He’s not drunk, not even tipsy, but his tongue has loosened somewhat. 

“You being a Gemini explains quite a lot,” Harry says and promptly looks away, embarrassed by the revelation that he had paid attention to a couple of Divination lessons. 

Malfoy doesn’t seem to notice. “If Pansy hadn’t tried to hand you over to the Dark Lord, you would get along famously,” he says instead, shooting Harry a wry look which turns mortified in the matter of seconds when he processes what words have left his mouth. 

Harry can’t be arsed to care. 

“Where is she?” he asks, instead. Pansy Parkinson was not charged with anything, given that she was not Marked and an abrupt, panicked attempt to hand the Chosen One over to the Dark side did not a valid charge make, especially when the Chosen One handed himself over eventually. 

He’s a little curious, even. Parkinson and Malfoy had been inseparable in school. Crabbe and Goyle had been followers bowing to a king. Parkinson had been the closest to a Queen as Malfoy had allowed. 

Malfoy shrugs now, all forced nonchalance and covert worry. “Probably Paris. I haven’t heard from her for a month.” He traces the rim of his glass and says with a fond smile that quivers at the edges, “She’ll turn up like a bad penny soon enough. She always does.” 

Harry looks down at his own glass, suddenly painfully aware of the ache in his heart that has been left by Ron and Hermione’s absence. He’d needed a break from them, sure, but they are parts of him just as much as he’s a part of them. His circumstances seem to weigh in on him all of a sudden. Alone, with Malfoy, in an Italian villa probably constructed with blood money, isolated from all his friends. It’s strange, and foreign and the wine turns sour in Harry’s mouth.

This will be his life for a year. 

Malfoy seems to pick up on his odd mood and the direction of his thoughts because the next words out of his mouth are, “And Granger? Where is she?” 

“Ron and ‘Mione went to Australia,” he says, unwilling to impart the reason why to Malfoy. It’s childish, but he feels more in control when he can hold some secrets to his chest. “Hermione has some work there and they decided to make a trip of it.” 

“The travelling trio,” Malfoy murmurs, eyes unfocused and lips stained red by wine. His tongue peeks out as he licks his bottom lip free of an errant droplet of wine. Harry isn’t sure if he’s supposed to be as focused as he is on the tiny motion. “Why didn’t you go with?” 

“You’re very interested in my friends all of a sudden,” Harry says, a little petulantly. “Why should I tell you about them?” 

Malfoy has the grace to look a little abashed. “I apologise if I overstepped, I was merely curious.” 

“Maybe if you bothered to be a better person, I would believe that,” Harry says, uncharitably. The fact that he’s spending his evening, and has signed up to spend the rest of the year in this git’s company seems to wash over him all of a sudden. His stomach has turned to ice. These lips twisted into a cruel sneer, calling Hermione a filthy Mudblood and Ron a Weasel is an image that keeps rising to the fore every time he can bring himself to look at Malfoy. 

Malfoy looks startled, then angry for a second and then resigned. His eyes on Harry are steady, the grey of them unbearable. 

He’s not traditionally attractive. He’s a little too sharp, his nose is too long, his lips are a cruel slash across his mouth when he curls them in. But he blossoms in the right settings. When firelight plays over his features, softening them down. When the sunlight of the Curtained Room filters in through the curtains to strike his grey irises. 

Malfoy is suited to flattery just as much as flattery is suited to him, and even nature seems to understand. 

Right now, there is nothing flattering about the look he has on his face. It’s dark and it’s ugly and it’s brimming with the sort of cavernous self-hatred that Harry knows all too well from what he’s seen in the mirror on his worst days. 

He hadn’t appreciated Malfoy’s retracted claws up until the moment he’s been faced with them out again, a defensive layer of protection Malfoy is drawing on. 

Harry expects barbs, insults, pointed words. He expects rage and accusations and he steels himself for it. 

He does not expect Malfoy to get up, knuckles white around the stem of his wine glass and disappear into the hallway that Harry knows leads to the staircase. 

But Malfoy does exactly that, leaving Harry open-mouthed and dumbfounded on the armchair before the fireplace, wondering in what world Malfoy does not pick fights with him even when he throws the avenue wide open, reeling with the shame of the unnecessary taunt and the guilt of dredging up that expression on Malfoy’s relaxed face. 

Harry scrubs a hand over his face. 

He thinks back to the last two days, Malfoy’s careful lack of antagonism, his most offensive behaviours being astonishment at the upkeep of a Muggle establishment and his lack of understanding of Muggle money.

He’s making an effort, Harry realises, in a rush. He’s genuinely trying. His reaction to Malfoy’s questions suddenly makes hot guilt pool in the pit of his stomach, a roiling tension that makes him itch and fidget. 

He needs to make it right. 

—

When Draco hears the knock on his door, he buries his face in his pillow. He’s not in the mood to deal with more of Potter’s rage. 

_You do not deserve to escape it_ , says the part of him that still lives in the cold cell of Azkaban, grey chill seeping into his bones. Sometimes Draco wonders if those wispy tendrils of darkness made their way into his heart and took up residence there. He wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. He’s used to dealing with darkness within himself, planted by another. 

He doesn’t say anything, but he does spell the door unlocked and grits his teeth when the handle snicks and the heavy wood creaks open. 

He doesn’t turn over, but he can imagine it, Potter silhouetted in the doorway, moonlight glinting off his spectacles, face contorted in an angry scowl, words berating Draco for his cowardice ready on his lips. 

When long minutes pass and nothing is forthcoming, Draco groans internally. Of course Potter would want to see his face for this. Of course Potter would want to watch him flinch away, want to watch him cower. 

_You do not deserve to escape it._

He shivers a little at the cold whisper of the words echoing through his body and turns over in his bed. Sitting up, he blinks. 

Potter does not look angry. In fact, he looks… ashamed, which doesn’t make sense. 

“That was—” Potter clears his throat. “That was unwarranted.” 

Draco is startled into a bitter laugh. “Are you serious?” he asks, when Potter simply stares. "That was… that wasn’t even a sliver of what I deserve.” 

Potter blinks at him. 

“You spoke at my trial, spoke at my mother’s trial, saved me from Fiendfyre, decided to accompany me in exile. What I deserve is Azkaban and isolation, but here I am. And you think you losing your temper is… unwarranted? Who the _hell_ are you?”

Potter blinks again. 

Draco sighs. This is the Potter he’s used to, confused and a little Stupefied. Not the one he’s been faced with for the past month, in the courtroom or Knockturn or the Muggle pub or here. It does little to comfort him. 

“Look Potter,” he says, suddenly weary. “I know you’d rather be with your friends or be by yourself in India or wherever else you want to go, or back in Britain with your girlfriend. You don’t have to stay here with some pathetic charity case of a failed Death Eater to assuage your survivor’s guilt or whatever it is that made you come up with this mad plan. You can go back.” 

“I don’t want to,” Potter says, the first words he’s spoken since he decided to tell Draco his perfectly reasonable argument downstairs was unwarranted. “I like being here.” 

“You don’t like me!” Draco says, losing the last vestiges of his control, during his hands in his hair. He must look ridiculous, sitting up in the large bed in the middle of the room, hair a mess and voice too high pitched to not be embarrassing. “You! You hate me, I don’t understand! Since yesterday, since the damn courtroom, you’ve been so bloody nice, it’s driving me absolutely insane and the first time you react like you’re supposed to, you come here and call it unwarranted, I don’t—” 

He subsides, because he’s exhausted himself of words though he still has too much to say. So much that it’s whirlpooling in his brain. 

Potter sighs and comes closer. “Can I sit on the bed?” 

Whatever he’s expected Potter to say, it had not been that. But then again, his current crisis is centred around Potter basically disregarding all expectations and being someone Draco can’t reconcile with his memories of his schoolyard nemesis, so he gives in and gestures in acceptance. 

Potter, in perfectly plebeian fashion, climbs knee first onto the duvet and sits cross legged on the edge of the bed. In the pool of moonlight that seems to drape over him like a veil of light, he looks as young as he is. 

“I don’t understand it,” Potter says, and he sounds so lost, that if it were another man, or if Draco himself were another man, he’d have reached out to touch him. “I don’t know why I came here, I don’t know why I spoke for you. I don’t even really know why I went back for you. In the fire.” 

Draco’s throat hurts “You should have let me die,” he says. “And all these problems would have been solved.” 

Potter jerks, as though he’s been struck. “Shut up,” he says fiercely. “Ungrateful bastard.” 

“What do I have to be grateful for?” Draco demands, abruptly angry. “I’m in exile. My mother won’t look at me properly because I refuse to use our dried-up well of contacts to get father out of Azkaban. When I go back, I won’t be seen as a respectable pure-blood seeking employment, I will be the disgraced Death Eater, the untrustworthy idiot. People will spit on me in the streets.” 

Potter’s eyes are unreadable. 

“Tell me why I should be grateful,” Draco says. The alternate implications of his words hang in the air, _tell me why I shouldn’t have died._ He doesn’t care that he sounds as though he’s begging for a reason. Courage, Draco. Be honest. He _is_ begging for a reason.

“Because your mother is still alive,” Potter says. His eyes are green, so green, even in the darkness of Draco’s room, even in the white glow of moonlight, a memory of a dead mother shrouding them. “Because you’re still a pure-blood in a society where prejudices exist, because it will take a while for society to be so completely reformed that the Mark on your arm, the one you can cover with long sleeves or another tattoo or makeup will take precedence over something as inane and arbitrary but as relevant as Blood Status.” He takes a sip of wine, and Draco feels shame shoot through him. 

“Because people might spit at you in the wizarding world because you chose to be a blood-purist and a bully, but if you walk the streets of Muggle London, or hell, anywhere, you’re still a white man in expensive clothes and people won’t shield their purses and wallets from you, won’t call the police if you bump into them or crash into them on the bus.” 

The shame, the shame. 

“Because you’re privileged, because you’ve always been privileged, and wanting to die in your secluded Italian villa because half your vaults are empty is an incredibly selfish thing to do when there are people in Britain who want to die because Voldemort decided to systematically go through their entire family for the simple crime of not being a pure-blood.” 

“I—” Draco starts, and discovers he doesn’t have anything to say. “I’m sorry.” 

“For?” 

“For assuming.” 

“Assuming what?” 

Draco buries his face in his hands. “I don’t know,” he says, and wonders if he sounds as woefully inadequate to Potter as he does to himself. “I don’t know, but I’m assuming something and I shouldn’t. I don’t know what it is, yet.” 

He looks up to see Potter smiling. 

“This is why I saved you,” he says. “Spoke for you. Came with you.” 

Draco stares. “What?” 

“Because you’re a stupid git who’s had too much money his whole life and not enough people telling him no. But you can still learn. And because whatever you saw with Voldemort, in your house, with your Father, has made you a better man than you were a boy.” He looks around, at the curtains, at the open door, at the bed, and then looks back to Draco, a little smirk pulling on the corner of his lips. “And the Italian villa sounded positively splendid when you spoke about it so mournfully into your whisky and I wanted to see it.” 

Draco stares at him. At this man, with his messy mop of hair and large eyes and long limbs, sitting in his bed, sipping wine while he gauges Draco’s reaction to his tidal wave of words which should not make sense but do. At this man whom he’d hated for rejection out of a petty childhood spitefulness that his father had been proud of and his mother had ignored. 

Sometimes he hates Weasley and Granger for having this man to themselves. Other times, he’s grateful for them, for the rejection, for the years that shaped Harry Potter into the kind of man who saved the world from everything Draco Malfoy stood for. 

Right now, the two arcs of his thought collide, combine, thread themselves together into a bittersweet surge of melancholy for everything that could have been and everything that is. 

“I’m not a good man,” he tells Potter, because Potter needs to know that before bestowing too much faith in him. 

Potter smiles, that charming, genuine thing that has Draco a little breathless and a little dazed. “Don’t worry Malfoy,” he says. “Neither am I.”


	4. Chapter 4

_I build a life & tear it apart  
& the sun keeps shining.  
—Daily Bread, Ocean Vuong_

By the time Malfoy’s birthday rolls around, the tentative truce they’ve struck has extended to long walks through the wizarding section of San Gimignano and brief but interesting forays into the Muggle part which usually involves copious amounts of gelato and pizza. 

“I have absolutely no idea why I let you convince me that this was a good idea,” Malfoy says, wrinkling his nose as he sucks banana flavoured gelato off his wooden spoon. 

Harry, who stuck to chocolate, expecting this, grins. 

“You’re the one who called me boring,” he points out. “Bet you wish you’d gone for boring now.” 

Malfoy scrunches his nose harder but doesn’t say anything, so Harry figures he’s won this round. 

After two more spoonfuls of blissful silence, Malfoy slams his own cup down and stares imploringly at Harry, casting unquestionably hungry looks at Harry’s cup, where the chocolate has begun to melt and droplets are cascading down the thin papery sides. 

Harry ignores him. 

“Potter,” Malfoy says. 

“Mm,” Harry responds, sucking his spoon into his mouth. 

_“Potter.”_

Harry grins. 

It gets significantly harder to ignore Malfoy’s unveiled desire to share Harry’s cup when a long, pale finger makes its way into Harry’s line of sight, dips its condescending way into his cup, swirls itself around and draws back. 

Harry looks up to see Malfoy sucking it into his mouth, cheeks hollowed and eyes closed. He’s a sight, hair tousled and cascading over his forehead, lips a little swollen from the ice cream and an expression on his face that Harry can only describe as post-orgasmic bliss. 

He can’t explain the precise reason why his breath skitters when he takes in the picture Malfoy makes, sinful and a little mischievous when the grey eyes open and the finger slides out of his mouth, spit slick and dark with lingering chocolate. 

“It’s my birthday,” he says, reaching for Harry’s cup again. 

_Might as well be mine,_ Harry thinks, a little dazed when Malfoy repeats the motion. 

—

“You’re awfully knowledgeable about Muggle history,” Potter says, his surprise dripping off his words. Draco wonders for a minute whether he ought to be offended or not. He figures it’s warranted. 

“When the culture of a place as small as this is bifurcated between Muggle and wizarding, sometimes it gets hard to differentiate,” he says by way of explanation. “Some of the Muggle history involves wizarding facts that they explain away and some of the wizarding history is heavily influenced by the actions of the Muggles.” 

“So the villa has been yours since the 1800s?” Potter asks. Potter’s naïveté regarding historical facts is surprisingly charming. He doesn’t know much—Draco can’t fault him, as when one’s only exposure to the subject is Binns, the expectations run so low they might as well be underground—but he’s ceaselessly curious. Draco doesn’t know if that’s Granger’s influence or his innate nature—either way, it’s endearing. 

“No,” he says. “The branch shifted out here in the 1700s and bought practically half the land in the wizarding village. And then, gradually, they began losing it to pay off debts and taxes until they had only about half the original area left. And then 1876 happened and the French and British branches got to know that this line had been completely wiped out. No one really wanted to delve too deep into it, but once my grandfather was old enough, he came to see it.” 

Draco pauses, unsure if he should continue, if Potter’s interested, if this is too much. He enjoys talking, especially about his history—Draco likes to revel in what he’s good at—but he can’t force the same expectations on Potter. 

But Potter asks, “And then?” and Draco smiles. 

“He found the place in ruins. Absolutely massacred, rubble everywhere. Some portions were preserved, quite intact, but most of it was in shambles. So he bought the property back from the wizarding state and redid the villa in the exact image of what it had once been with provisions for modern facilities. Which is why it has—” 

“Working bathrooms?” Potter asks. 

“Yes,” Draco says surprised. “Yes, working bathrooms.” 

Potter smiles, a small, pleased thing and warmth spreads through Draco’s heart. 

—

“Don’t you miss the Weaslett—Ginevra?” Malfoy asks. They’re at a pizza parlour, a dimly lit room with a sign outside which claims in broken English that they have the best pizza in San Gimignano. 

Harry raises an eyebrow. “What brought this on?” 

Malfoy averts his eyes. “Well, one would assume that since the war is over, the Saviour would want to spend some time with his girlfriend instead of gallivanting about the Italian countryside with a Marked Death Eater—” 

Harry holds up a hand to stop Malfoy’s rushed word vomit. “She’s not my girlfriend,” he says. “She hasn’t been, since I left—for, for seventh year.” 

“Oh,” Malfoy says, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know—” 

Harry shrugs. There are people who don’t know about him and Ginny breaking up. There are people who do know and choose to wilfully ignore like Molly and on occasion, Ron. Harry prefers the former to the latter. It’s less messy. 

“Don’t you miss Parkinson?” he asks instead, remembering Malfoy lounging in her lap on the train in sixth year, her hands carding through his hair. 

Malfoy’s brows scrunch before his expression clears into one of understanding. “I—yes, yes I do. But Pansy and I were never—” 

He makes a vague gesture. 

“You took her to the ball,” Harry says surprised. 

Malfoy’s eyebrows twitch. “And you took Patil.” 

Harry concedes the point. 

“Everyone at school thought you both were—” Harry emulates Malfoy’s vague gesture.

Malfoy shrugs and smiles ruefully. “Helped keep up appearances,” he says. “We never confirmed or denied the rumours but they… served the purpose.” 

“The purpose?” Harry asks, confused. 

“Mutually beneficial,” Malfoy says and nods when their server appears with a plateful of steaming pizza that makes Harry’s mouth water. “She was… dating someone she shouldn’t have and I was… compromised.” 

“That’s the vaguest bullshit I’ve heard all day and I heard that man at the leather shop tell us that wallet was sheepskin.” 

Malfoy keeps his eyes on his pizza. “In fifth year, Pansy started dating Justin Finch-Fletchley,” he says. 

Oh. 

“A Muggle-born?” Harry asks. He’s never really known the Blood Status of the other house members, but he knows at least one of Justin’s parents is Muggle. From the way Malfoy is grimacing at his pizza, he’s right. “I thought he was gay.” 

Malfoy jerks up to look at him with eyes so wide that Harry’s alarmed. “What? Don’t tell me you’re homopho—” 

Malfoy starts laughing. It’s a full belly laugh tinged with hysteria, something frightened and excited and a little out of control and Harry’s alarm ratchets higher. The other patrons are looking at them with thinly veiled distaste and in desperation, Harry reaches across the table to grab his arm. 

Malfoy stops laughing as abruptly as he’d started. 

“Oh Potter,” he says, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Potter, you—” 

“Are you homophobic?” Harry demands, jerking his hand back. If that’s something else he needs to deal with—

“I’m gay,” Malfoy says, and the world tilts on its axis. 

Oh. 

_Oh._

“You got Pansy’s men all mixed up, I’m afraid,” Malfoy says and bites into his pizza. Harry picks at his olives. 

"That was insensitive of me,” he admits. “I wouldn’t have been so—”

“Don’t,” Malfoy says. “You reacted the way I would if I thought someone was homophobic.” He hesitates, takes another bite of his pizza and says after a few agonising seconds of delicate chewing, “Gryffindor’s Golden Boy isn’t a homophobe, is he?” 

Harry picks at more olives. 

“It would be rather hypocritical,” he confesses. 

“You’re _gay?_ ” 

Harry winces at the volume of Malfoy’s words and the looks they get from the other patrons at that.

“Sorry,” Malfoy says at a lower volume. “You’re gay?!” 

Harry shakes his head. “I don’t know yet,” he admits. “I like girls, Cho and Ginny, those were real. But I think I might—” he closes his eyes and braces for the admission, for the first time he’s going to let the words cross the threshold of his lips, “I think I might like boys too.” 

When he opens his eyes, Malfoy is staring at him, slack jawed and a little dazed. 

Harry feels the abrupt need to glare. “Stop looking at me like that,” he hisses. “Like I’m some specimen in a—in a gay history zoo!” 

Malfoy continues to stare. 

“Malfoy!” 

Nothing. 

“Draco!” 

Malfoy jerks, startled. “I beg your pardon,” he says, cheeks tinged pink. “I was… processing.” 

“ _My_ sexuality?”

Malfoy looks embarrassed again. “It’s my birthday, Potter,” he scowls, struggling to keep it from morphing into mortification and not quite succeeding. “Be nice.” 

Harry grins and stops picking at his olives. 

—

“Have you ever…” Potter trails off, and Draco turns to look at him and finds him worrying his bottom lip with his teeth, staring into the distance. 

They’re lounging on the armchairs on the patio, glasses of lemonade with a splash of vodka clutched in their hands. Gianni’s meticulous upkeep of the rose bushes is evident in the soft smell of them heavy in the air. 

Draco misses his mother. 

“What?” he asks, and cringes at how irritable it sounds. He schools his expressions into neutrality when Potter turns towards him and scowls. 

“Nothing,” he says. “Not if you’re going to be a dick about it.” 

Draco sighs. Of course. 

“I’m not going to be a dick about it.” 

“You just—” 

“I said I won’t!” 

“You’re really not inspiring a lot of faith here—” 

“Merlin damn it, you’re a stubborn arsehole—” 

“Why are you _shouting_ at me—” 

“You’re a colossal twat when you want to be—” 

“I didn’t even say anything!” Potter shouts and Draco faces him to see him red in the face, lower lip jutting out the way it does when he’s upset and doesn’t want to show it. Draco feels guilty and then promptly angry with himself for feeling guilty. 

“Did I hurt poor Potty’s feelings?” he taunts and watches the way Potter’s eyes go flinty and his jaw tightens. The ache in his heart only serves to rile him up further. “Should I throw in a comment about Mudbloods? What better can you expect from a Death Eater, picking fights and throwing tantrums—” 

Potter gets up and walks away. 

Draco stares after him open-mouthed and furious, unsure why he picked this fight in the first place, fuming that he lost it, disappointed that he had the last word and still Potter retained the dignity. 

He slams his head back in his chair and tries not to cry. 

In the absence of Potter’s weirdly steadying company, the bone deep ache of his mother’s absence, the weight of his friends not talking to him, the circumstances where the only person willing to put up with him is his childhood enemy—

Merlin, he’s in _exile._ The shame of it! The horror of it, a Malfoy in exile, a Malfoy thinking about work, a Malfoy willingly handing over the contents of half the vaults without a fight. The pressure of generations of Malfoys disapproving of this heir chokes him until he’s gasping, until the hot tears are sliding down his face, obscuring his vision, until the only sound in his ears is the horrible, rasping breaths he’s drawing in, until his nose is filled with the scent of the roses that remind him of his mother’s perfume and her gentle smile and her iron will. 

He’s sobbing and he’s shaking and suddenly someone is pressing a glass of water into his hands and he looks up to see Gianni’s watery blue eyes staring down at him, leathery face screwed up in worry. 

The roiling, curling anger finally finds a focus, and he feels his face twist into a snarl, the words coming out almost against his will but horrifyingly suited to his voice and his face and his motherfucking status—

“ _Filthy little elf!_ How dare you—” 

He cuts himself off, remembering Dobby before he vanished with Potter and Granger and Weasley and the other prisoners, eyes wide with Bellatrix’ blade lodged in his heart, his little nursemaid elf killed by Dolohov for simply bringing in the wrong dish, the Hogwarts elves shaking in fear when Amycus and Alecto made examples of them at the dinner table. 

Gianni’s concern is morphing into wide eyed terror and his small hands are coming up to tug at his massive ears and he’s muttering in Italian under his breath. Draco’s Italian is formal, he doesn’t understand the garbled, mangled colloquialisms or the elvish grammar, but he picks up on the words _iron_ and _hammer_ and remembers with a sick lurch his father’s preferred methods of punishment and why Draco, in his moments as a better human being and a son fit to be disowned, hates him as much as he does.

“No,” he says, reigning himself in. “No,” he says louder, noticing with mounting panic that Gianni is spiralling. “No, no, I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry. Here,” he says, holding up the glass of water in Gianni’s face. “Here, thank you, I am drinking.” 

He does, and closes his eyes in tightening shame when he notices Gianni has splashed in a couple drops of Calming Draught. 

By the time the glass is empty, Gianni is wringing his hands together, but Draco notices with some relief he has stopped murmuring about ironing his ears. 

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and bats away the thought which whispers his father’s disappointed words in his ear. _Apologising to the house-elves, Draco? Is this what you were taught?_ “I didn’t mean to say those things. Thank you for the water. It helped.” 

A tremulous smile makes its way onto Gianni’s face and he bobs his head a little, taking the glass back from Draco. “Young master is calling when he is needing something,” he says and Draco sighs in relief. When he opens his eyes, the elf is gone. 

Birds are chirping. The quiet of the patio is oppressively heavy. Above him, a window slams shut with a sense of finality that chills Draco to his bones. 

—

Dinner is a formal affair, Harry sitting at one end of the table, Malfoy at the other. Harry notices the elf Malfoy shouted at—Gianni—isn’t the one serving them. From Malfoy’s stricken expression, he notices it too. 

When they’re alone with their plates, Harry’s anger spills. “Satisfied?” he asks, gesturing in the direction the elves seem to materialise from. “You don’t need to put on a show for me, you know.” 

“A show?” 

“All the spinning around on the front steps, all the careful avoidance of ever saying blood slurs in front of me when they’re probably playing on loop inside that sick head of yours, all the pretences. You can drop it.” 

Malfoy drops his fork instead. He’s pale in the face and shaking a little, and Harry refuses to feel bad. All of a sudden, this Malfoy isn’t the one who thanked everyone in front of a packed Wizengamot or the one who refused to identify him at the Manor or the one who lowered his wand on the Astronomy Tower. This is the one who called Hermione a Mudblood from second year, this is the Malfoy who joined the Inquisitorial Squad—Harry’s hand flexes, and he knows the scar screaming _I must not tell lies_ is standing out stark and pale against his skin under the table—the Malfoy who stomped on his nose, the Malfoy who dressed up as a Dementor and sent Harry plummeting to the ground, the Malfoy who—the Malfoy who—

Merlin, what is he _doing_ here? Why is he here?

He spears his duck with more force than strictly necessary and resolves to pack his bags and leave the next morning. Saving Malfoy from himself is not Harry’s job. 

“I missed my mother,” Malfoy says, and it’s Harry’s turn to drop his fork. “We were sitting outside, and there were roses. She loves roses, her perfume always smells of them. And she—she tends the Manor’s rose gardens by herself. They’re probably falling to ruins now.” 

“But she’s at the Manor, isn’t she?” 

Malfoy laughs, cruel and bitter. “They won’t let her out of the house,” he says, voice hoarse. “They won’t even let her step onto the grounds. She wrote to me—she’s allowed to write once a month, and she wrote to me saying she’s asked some Auror to water her roses—” 

He cuts himself off, hiccuping. 

“Malfoy,” Harry’s voice comes out surprisingly gentle, even to himself. “Malfoy, I’m sorry.” 

Malfoy doesn’t look up. 

“I understand it too,” Harry says. “Sometimes I—Sometimes I miss my mother and I didn’t even know her.” 

Malfoy makes an unintelligible sound. 

“They’re quite alike, you know?” Harry says, latching onto the last topic of conversation he’d have thought possible in any degree of civility with Malfoy of all people. “They’d do anything for us. My mother died to keep me safe from Voldemort. Your mother lied to his face.” 

Malfoy looks up, startled astonishment evident on his face. 

Harry smiles a little, relating to the expression all too well. 

“She’s angry with me,” Malfoy says. “I won’t get Father out of Azkaban. I won’t even try.” 

“Why not?” Harry asks. Malfoy’s face flashes with rage.

“He’s the one who got us into this mess. He’s going to drag himself out of it,” he says, darkly and promptly looks horrified. Harry thinks he understands. The Malfoys’ honour code would never allow for a transgression against one’s own father in such uncharitable words. 

“Mother wanted me to ask you,” Malfoy says after a moment. “To speak for him too. I refused.” 

“If you’d asked, I would have slammed my door on your face,” Harry says without hesitation. He would never, not in a million years, speak for Lucius Malfoy and spare him the well deserved hell of Azkaban. 

“I know,” Malfoy says. “But she doesn’t. She saw you speak for me, saw you speak for her, heard you sent a written recommendation for Theo and so she—” He hesitates and says in a carefully blank voice, “She hoped.” 

It’s a tall order of hope, but Harry isn’t blind enough to hold it against Narcissa Malfoy. Love makes fools of us all. 

“Malfoy,” he says instead. “Missing your mother isn’t reason enough to bring up that word. Or rail at your elves.” 

Malfoy looks guilty and then briefly annoyed. “They’re _elves,_ Potter—” 

“Compassion,” Harry interrupts. “That’s what Voldemort didn’t have. He had everything else. Devotion, loyalty, hell— _money._ Anything he could want, he had. But he didn’t have compassion.” He gestures to Malfoy’s left forearm, covered by his long-sleeved shirt. “You don’t want to be defined by that thing, right?” he asks. Malfoy scowls at him but shakes his head. 

“Then don’t let his ideology steal the compassion from you,” Harry says. “He is not worth doing yourself that disservice.” 

Malfoy opens his mouth and shuts it. His eyes are a little wide and his hands are clenching and unclenching on the table. Harry knows it will take a while to break Malfoy’s conditioning, but in the brief but sincere nod he receives, there’s the sweet taste of a battle won. 

The war still rages.


	5. Chapter 5

_Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.  
—Good Bones, Margaret Atwood _

“We should go somewhere else,” Potter says, stretching his legs out. It’s late evening on an idle day in late June and the villa is bathed in pink and gold, as vibrant as a bruise, as beautiful and inexplicable as a kaleidoscope. “It’s been a while here.” 

They’re lounging on the garden floor, clothes probably mottled with grass stains and bug juice, but for once in his meticulous life, Draco couldn’t care less. It’s nice in a way he never thought sunset gazing with Potter could be. 

For once, there is no war, there is no Dark Mark, there is no angry, house-arrested mother or the ghost of the dead lingering. For once, Draco is just Draco, staring up at a sky as divine as a blessing, mind free of weighted guilt, lying beside the boy he fancies in the backyard of his fancy villa. 

He wonders if exile is always like this for everyone before Potter’s exasperated lectures about privilege kick in and he realises that he’s a rich boy in a white world and he’s allowed to luxuriate in exile while many people in his position with less of Daddy’s money saved up in vaults and expensive villas would probably be forced to become anonymous starving artists in dusty, forgotten attics. 

There is guilt, when Potter frames it like that, a bald truth that had been drowned out by the tinkling laughter of his mother’s guests and the booming declarations of his father’s business associates. It had been a tune secreted away in his mother’s eyes when she misspoke and mentioned her forgotten sister, a pride etched into the elegant head of his father’s cane. 

Of course there is guilt, stark and black against his pale forearm, a hideous mangled scar of a war Draco fought with himself as much as he did with the classmates he saw growing up. 

On most days, it tastes bitter as bile, a burning in his throat, unquenchable and immortal, a burden to be borne to death. Sometimes Draco wonders if the Wizengamot would have punished him at all if they had been allowed to cast _Legilimens_ and pick his brain apart to take a look into the recesses and crevices of his shame. 

But on other days, the guilt morphs into frustrated anger laced with learning, still strangling but somewhat sweeter because Potter’s patient explanations wring it out of him. It’s proof that Potter talks to him enough for Draco to now understand what merits guilt and somehow the warm weight of Potter’s regard and unrelenting faith is heavier than the wince of shame as he takes in his inherited surroundings. 

If Draco is a sinner, Potter is salvation. If Draco is a wound, gaping and raw, Potter is a balm. Draco’s soul has been corrupted, he knows it, remembers it weighing heavy in his nightmares and his memories, in his instincts and his inhibitions. Perhaps it is the simple physics of magnetism that draws him—the blackened, corrupted corpse of him—like a moth to the flame of Potter’s purity. 

“I want to go to Florence,” Draco says, because he does. He wants to revisit the city he dreams of in his escapist fantasies, wants to lose himself in the throng of voices. Florence buzzes with people, with voices, with the ambitious silence of art critics and the delighted nervousness of young couples who save up enough money for a romantic getaway to somewhere that is not Paris or Milan. Florence is a hub of everything the better parts of Draco revel in and he wants to visit it, if only to hate himself a little less. Potter shrugs, because Potter doesn’t care where they go as long as they go somewhere. 

“Michelangelo, right?” Potter asks. “Florence?” 

“Art in general,” Draco says, closing his eyes and thinking of the way even a walk in an innocuous side street seems to brim with artistry and elegance in Florence. “But yeah, Michelangelo.” 

“I want to see David,” Potter says and for a split second Draco is surprised he even knows what David is. His ever traitorous mind superimposes Potter’s face, sculpted like a dark god’s onto the fine boned grace of David’s musculature. Potter’s curling hair, his white streak of the magnificent scar, his eyes emotive and expressive behind the glasses. Draco imagines it all set in stone for the world to see and for the first time mourns his lack of artistic skill. 

And then Potter ruins it by saying in typical Potter fashion, with a grin broad enough to split his face in two, “I want to measure his dick,” and the world shifts back into place. 

—

They stay in a tiny Muggle hotel near the Duomo that is very creatively named, “Duomo”. Both Potter and Draco snort when they see the word painted onto the dark wood of the sign, and unanimously agree that this place seems perfect for their purposes. The split second hesitation Draco has before asking for two rooms instead of one like he wants to has the shrewd-eyed receptionist look up from her book to peer first at him and then behind him to where Potter’s standing with his hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans, bouncing on the balls of his feet. 

Potter had, with uncharacteristic foresight, conjured IDs for them which look impressively professional though Draco doesn’t understand half the stuff written on them. They fool the receptionist—who, to be fair seems significantly less interested in the IDs than she is in sending the two of them meaningful glances—so Draco isn’t really complaining. 

Potter shoots the receptionist a media-perfect smile, grabs Draco’s arm and leads them into the lift which Draco comes to realise moves quite differently from the one in the Ministry. For one it’s smoother, for another it only moves vertically and for another, there are mirrors inside which Draco appreciates both because he enjoys looking at himself and because seeing two of Potter doesn’t seem quite as bad a circumstance now as it would have once when he was in third year and Potter was charmingly tossing snowballs into his face from under his infernal Invisibility Cloak. 

Their rooms are adjoining, and when Potter mutters an eloquent _bugger-fuck!_ followed by an explanatory crash from within his, Draco realises the walls are also paper thin. 

For some reason, he keeps that knowledge to himself when they both emerge, freshly showered, from their rooms to spend the afternoon walking around Firenze, soaking up its bustling charm. There’s something secretively intimate about knowing the curses Potter whispers under his breath to himself, the tunes of the songs he hums in his space, the quiet sighs when he loosens the bindings of his shoes and the soft thud of them skidding across the floor and hitting the opposite wall. 

Outside the sun is up, and Draco, a little discomfited in his Muggle attire, holds his hand up to shield his eyes from the glaring light that seems to scorch the pavements and rational thought from Draco’s brain. 

There’s a nudge against his arm and he turns, surprise shocking him into silence when Potter holds out a fashionable pair of sunglasses to him, another pair perched on his nose where his round-rimmed glasses were. Potter’s wiry, energy packed into a slender frame and usually, the clothes he wears make him look scrawny and a little underfed. Today, the sunglasses paired with the white T-shirt and the faded but fitted jeans make him look… handsome in a way Draco hasn’t considered this personally before. 

He knows he’s attracted to Potter. It’s a fact, an awareness at the back of his brain, a sensitivity that Draco on his worst days thinks of as humiliating weakness and on his best thinks of as a possibility for something more. But his attraction has hinged on Potter’s intensity—the world of emotions hiding behind the verdant gaze, the scar running down the side of his forehead, stretching almost imperceptibly onto the top of his right eyebrow. He’s attracted to the way Potter holds a conversation, with full focus and unexpected charisma. He’s attracted to who he sees Potter to be. 

Right now, he thinks he might also be attracted to everything Potter keeps hidden under his terrible clothes, to the curves of him that seem to tease Draco when the jeans cling in the right places, to the edges of him shown off when his shirt hugs the muscles of his shoulders. He’s not muscled in the way fit Quidditch players are or the Muggles who Draco sometimes sees running in the gyms are. He’s still shaking off the awkward gangly elongations of puberty and the teenage awkwardness that Draco still finds himself succumbing to. But he is striking, a charming, off-centre elegance surrounding him with an aura of approachable attractiveness. 

He doesn’t make heads turn, but Draco’s eyes can’t move away, fixating on the way Potter’s resting expression appears to be a subconscious smile. 

He accepts Potter’s offering of sunglasses and acknowledges the fact that he’s fucked with a resigned sigh and a particularly hard shove to the glasses up his face which he regrets immediately when the bridge of his nose begins to hurt. 

—

If Malfoy is a prince and they’re going by fairytale definitions of such things, the analogy seems to suggest that Harry is the dragon given that at the moment, watching Malfoy’s arse stalk through the streets of Florence, Harry wants to eat him. 

That makes it sound worse than it really is—admittedly, vaguely cannibalistic and definitely violent—but Harry really, really wants to taste the sharp jut of Malfoy’s collarbone, run his hands down Malfoy’s side, grope his arse a little, slide his palms up the jut of his scapulas. 

It’s agonising, taking in street names and trying to avoid oncoming trams and traffic while being so thoroughly distracted by a man who seems to be completely unaware of the effect he’s having on Harry. And while Harry appreciates the fact that Malfoy seems to have no inkling of the kind of thoughts Harry harbours for him, he wishes Malfoy would tone down the lascivious and apparently completely unintentional swing of his hips if only for the sake of road safety. 

“When I came here,” Malfoy says and Harry is jerked rudely out of his reverie, “Father told me Firenze wasn’t done justice to by the Muggles.” 

His eyes are unreadable behind his sunglasses.

“Why?” Harry asks. 

Malfoy shrugs. “My father didn’t believe Muggles did justice to anything. But mainly because many wizarding artists lived in Florence and the Muggles never took those buildings and made them into museums or even bothered to preserve them as historically valuable.” 

“The Muggles couldn’t have known!” Harry protests, temper flaring. “You can’t just—” 

“I know that now,” Malfoy snaps. “But when I was six and my father was looking at a clothesline where there should have been a plaque, it seemed… real.” 

“And now?” Harry asks warily. 

Malfoy shrugs again. He looks uncomfortable and a little embarrassed. “I don’t always know what to think but”—he points at a completely arbitrary building—“that was Domenico Ghirlandaio’s workshop.” 

“Who was…?” 

“Muggle,” Malfoy snorts. “Renaissance fresco artist. You see this place—it should have been a museum. This is where Michelangelo apprenticed. And yet—” He shrugs again, shoulders tight. “And yet it’s just any old house now.” 

Harry doesn’t know what to say. 

“But here—in Florence, if you were to make every place where an artist who is now world famous, where a creator who left the world a legacy set foot into a museum, the common folk wouldn’t be able to live anywhere. They’d be on the streets, but even the streets were walked by those people. Makes you think, doesn’t it?” 

Malfoy is vibrating with tension. 

“They were just people once,” he whispers. “They were all just people once, doing what set them at peace.” 

Harry’s mouth is dry. He doesn’t understand why but the set of Malfoy’s shoulders, his fists clenched by his side, his mouth curving around the words, is heavier than it should be. Something about the moment is meaningful in a way Malfoy isn’t otherwise. 

They were all just people once, trying to live their lives, trying to work the kinks of their minds and complicated thoughts out through art. Somewhere in these streets, Michelangelo probably had his first kiss. And then, he had not been Michelangelo, world famous artist and sculptor, he had probably been a shy boy with a crush. Somewhere on these streets, Dante had probably tripped on a loose stone and cursed himself out to the shock of passersby. 

There is legacy in every step of the city and with the rest of their lives stretching out before them, who Harry and Draco are here is a legacy in itself. 

“What sets you at peace?” Harry asks, because the light in Malfoy’s eyes pleads and flickers with the unspoken desire to be asked, though the question is unclear. He wants to speak, he wants to spill, he wants to stop holding back and Harry doesn’t know how to tread around this minefield of discovery but he tries anyway because this is what he came to do. 

That is a minefield of a discovery in itself, realising in a bustling Florentine street that he came here to… ask Malfoy the questions he needs to be asked to become who he should be. He still doesn’t know the why or the how, but he has some answers and it is more than Harry has had in a while. 

“I don’t know,” Malfoy breathes, looking at him. “I have no idea. But I think—” He hesitates. “I think I might like to find out.” 

“How?” Harry whispers. His head is a riot of colour and thoughts he can’t discern, but there are words he can still make sense of, and _how_ rings like a gong through the fog of his brain. The buzz of chatter and the footsteps of people, the crush of tourists and locals fade into background noise. Behind the sunglasses, Malfoy’s eyes are wide. 

“Teach me,” he says and the words are so unexpected that Harry is left reeling from the force of them. 

“What?” 

“You make me think,” Malfoy says, hands coming up to rest on his own nape. “You make me question. I came here, thinking I would spend it hating Voldemort and wallowing in my misery, but you… you’ve pushed me. I—” His face turns a little red. “I like who I am when you push me.” 

Harry has known joy. Harry has known grief. Harry has known hatred and love, Harry has known victory tinged with defeat. But the satisfaction of this moment is new. There are no proper words for it, none that could encompass the sheer joy of seeing this transformation. It’s like watching a flower bloom, waiting with the diseased bud into the night, waking to a new dawn where a delicate flower has taken its place, as resilient as the bud, as beautiful as life, as sacred as any God. 

“Truce,” Harry says, clearing his throat and holding out a hand. 

Malfoy swallows and looks down and after a long moment of hesitation, grips it and says in a dry, scratchy voice, “Truce, Potter.” 

“Call me Harry,” Harry says, grinning. It will be gloriously strange, but he can’t wait. 

Malfoy clears his throat. “Draco then,” he says and Harry is surprised by the ease with which his brain ceases to think of the man before him as _Malfoy_ and as _Draco._ There’s a metaphor there, Harry knows, for how Malfoy is distancing himself from the identity dictated to him by a family legacy, but for now, they aren’t representatives or metaphors, they aren’t two sides of the same coin, boys without choices caught in old men’s wars. 

They’re just Harry and Draco, on a sidewalk in Florence, shaking hands and smiling, a little hesitantly, a little euphorically, at each other.


	6. Chapter 6

_And I am rough and rude, yet not more rough to see  
Than is the hidden ghost that has its home in me."_

_About her lips there played a smile of almost scorn,_  
"My friend," she gently said, "you have not heard me mourn;  
—The Prisoner, Emily Brontë 

Perhaps it is privilege, perhaps it is brattiness, perhaps it is entitlement—but Draco has always found a certain amount of solace in blaming the universe for his circumstances.

Given his life, it’s not hard. It’s not _his_ fault he was born to Lucius Malfoy, it’s not _his_ fault Voldemort decided to exist in his timeline, it’s not _his_ fault that Minerva McGonagall’s understanding of Transfiguration is not the same as his, therefore ensuring a solid A instead of the O he expected. 

It’s definitely not his fault that he is now being tortured by thin walls that do absolutely nothing to disguise the sound of Potter’s pleased, choked-off moans as he wanks. 

Except—

It is a little, isn’t it? He’s the one who said nothing about the walls when he knew. He’s the one who is hard in his bed hearing the slick sounds of Potter’s hand over his cock. He’s the one who isn’t doing anything about it when he could, just by calling out a little loudly for Potter— _Harry_ to stop. 

He needs sleep. They’ve made plans to go to the Uffizi tomorrow and Draco wants to get an early start to his day. But right now, hearing the long drawn out muffled cry of Harry’s pleasure, everything else seems to pale in comparison. There can be nothing more exquisite than the sounds Harry is making except maybe if he made them into Draco’s mouth or the crook of his neck as Draco took over the onus of the ministrations that are twisting the sounds out of Harry’s throat in the first place. 

He groans and tosses in his bed, flinging the pillow up over his head, hoping it will drown out the sounds and his sinful thoughts. 

Needless to say, it doesn’t work. 

Instead he feels hot, and more than a little suffocated, so instead he flings the pillow aside and rests his warm, sweat-slicked forehead on the cool bedsheets underneath, trying to get his breathing under control. It’s hard, when Harry is still going at it and Draco is treated to the litany of curses that drip from Harry’s tongue and slither their way into Draco’s head. 

He’s painfully hard in his pyjama bottoms and just to relieve the pressure of it, Draco slides his hand into his pants and presses the heel of it to the junction of his cock and his balls. His cock twitches, interested and alert against his warm palm and Draco has to bite his own frantic groan into the pillow which he hastily retrieves with one flailing hand. 

Fuck Potter. Truly. _Thoroughly._

Potter groans, long and loud, and Draco is convinced that even if the walls hadn’t been criminally thin, he’d have heard that particular expression of ecstasy. As it is, he’s certain the whole motel’s already heard it. It’s embarrassing in a deliciously crude way, and as his cheeks flame hot, his hand grows more insistent against his erection until he can’t convince himself any longer that he’s trying to will it away and not wank it away. 

He has the upper hand of knowledge, so when he wraps his fingers around the leaking head of his dick and rubs himself fast and hard, he knows to be silent, he knows to sink his teeth into the pillow, into the meat of his palm instead of letting the sounds escape. It’s one thing to listen to Harry wank. It’s quite another to make Harry listen to him doing the same to the soundtrack of Harry’s pleasure.

One cannot be helped. The other is something Draco isn’t ready for Harry to know yet. 

“Shit,” he whispers quietly, lips scratching against the soft pillowcase, dick twitching in his hand. He ruts gently against the bed, the cool cloth of his pyjamas keeping the friction heady and strong but not unbearable. His precome slicks the way and his movements are gutting rougher as he coasts the shore of his orgasm, the waves of it lapping at his nerves but not daring to spill. 

In the other room, Harry makes a low, wanton sound. 

If Draco didn’t know that Harry would never do this if he knew Draco was listening in, he’d accuse Harry of putting on a show. But that is perhaps another one of Draco’s tendencies—to find someone to blame even in the throes of an orgasm he shouldn’t be having. Harry muffles what sounds like a name as he shouts and probably comes, and despite the curl of shame weaving through his soul, Draco’s pleasure ricochets off the walls of his restraint and he’s coming too, soaking his pyjamas, his hands, a little portion of the sheets. 

By the time the high recedes, Harry is silent. Draco feels dirty. 

He gropes for his wand on the bedside table, casting a careful Cleaning Charm on the mess he’s made and sinks his sweaty head back into the pillow, letting the guilt ridden satisfaction of the moment ravage whatever’s left of his confused emotions. 

—

Harry knows something is wrong. 

Draco has been avoiding him for a week, in the weird, condescendingly polite way Harry has only ever experienced firsthand from his uncle’s boss who once came over to Privet Drive and looked at him as though he were a potted plant instead of a human being. 

Everyone who’s ever come to Privet Drive has looked at Harry as something other than a human being, but coming from Draco, who before this week had been surprisingly decent, it stings more than Harry thinks it should. It makes him angry with himself and consequently angry with the world, and even the tiny cafe they go to for lunch with white decor and blooming flowers curling over the walls does nothing to cheer him up. He snaps at the waitress and then apologises profusely, he trips over a stone on the sidewalk and curses loud enough for several heads to turn in judgemental stares and eventually bangs his door on his way to his room so loud that the glass vase on the table near the door teeters on the edge and falls over, breaking to pieces. 

It’s easily fixed, and no one who doesn’t peer at the strange animal motifs will notice anything out of place, but the simmering tension coiling in his gut as Draco’s cool indifference comes back to him does not disappear. 

He smushes his face into his pillow and groans, furious and more than a little hurt. It’s been almost two months of their functional relationship, and the fact that Malfoy has chosen now to be a brat feels a little like deception to Harry. 

In the safety of his own room where his expressions aren’t on display, Harry can admit, a little reluctantly to the fact that he’d have preferred the old Malfoy to this Draco. The snarls and the biting insults were well worn and safe territory—Harry knew how to give as good as he got. But this Draco is cool and collected and spares Harry nothing but a token survey every morning before leaving him to his own devices. If Harry packed his bags and left the next morning, he doubts Draco would notice. 

The thought makes him sit bolt upright in bed. That’s it, isn’t it? His foot taps to the rhythm of his erratic heartbeat and his brain whirls through Draco’s reactions and behaviours the entirety of the past week. The unhappy slant of his lips, the fervent desire obvious in his eyes to be as far away from Harry as possible, the maddening indifference. Draco wants him gone, but he’s a coward, so he won’t say it to Harry’s face. He’s going to make Harry lose it and then pin it on him when he is forced to leave. 

_Fuck_ him.

He scrubs his hand over his face, undoubtedly fucking up his hair further, but in the moment, staring at the wall that separates him and Draco, Harry feels small and more than a little lost. This trip with Draco has been keeping him from thinking about the other things he’s left behind in Britain that he doesn’t want to think about—Fred and the flux he’s in with Ginny, Ron’s haunted eyes and Molly’s shaking hands, Padma’s screams when Parvati was found dead, slumped over Lavender. Remus. Tonks. Colin Creevey with his camera Transfigured into a makeshift shield, face frozen in a surprised scream. 

The ghosts he’s been trying to push away are crowding in on him, and all Harry can do is stare at the blank white wall before him. The sounds of the battle are coming back to him, the screams of terror, the manic laughter of the truly corrupted Death Eaters. Sparks of green and red fizzle in his brain and the jarring sensation of his Disarming Spell connecting with Voldemort’s Killing Curse shoots up his right arm. Everything is collapsing—the towers, the people, the collateral damage of a war Harry wasn’t competent enough to stop, the ghosts of his parents and their friends, his brain—and all Harry can do, is stare, unseeing at the chipped cracks of plaster in the wall. 

He stares until he can’t, until there are tears running down his cheeks from the corners of his burning eyes. He stares until his body can’t hold him up anymore and he sways on the bed, arms useless by his side, quaking as shivers wrack their way through him. 

There’s gravel under his feet one moment, cold linoleum the next. There’s a blurring forest in front of him one moment, chipped plaster the next. 

He’s alive until he’s not, he’s breathing until he’s not, lungs burning, eyes stinging, mouth open as he tries to draw in air that won’t enter, his hands stretching into the emptiness of his surroundings, trying to find an anchor that isn’t there. 

His vision is turning dark around the edges, and the room is spinning until he can’t make sense of anything except the lightning-shaped crack in the plaster on the wall, it’s jagged edges cutting into his brain, until all he can see is lightning scars and lightning spells, dancing in blue and green and red before his eyes. 

It’s almost all overwhelmed by black as his vision tunnels further and then it turns abruptly grey. If he weren’t in limbo between where he was and where he is, the grey would be soothing. It’s beautiful, the colour of storm clouds on a day made for staying indoors, the colour of Hermione’s soft sweatpants and Ron’s favourite coffee cup. 

It’s the colour of Draco’s eyes. He focuses on it, because he thinks he’s dying, and when he dies, he doesn’t want to see green and red flashing lights— _sorry father, sorry mother_ —he wants to be buried in the soft grey of a graveyard on a winter morning, held in place by Draco’s eyes, bid farewell by the comforting scent of Hermione’s hair and Ron’s coffee. 

Harry has died once and if he must do it again so soon, for the last time, he wants to do it better. 

He can hear voices. Some sound like his mother’s, tinkling and cheerful, asking him to come home. Some like Sirius’, boisterous and tinged with mirth, repeating _faster and easier than falling asleep._ And another one, more frantic, repeating over and over again, _breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe._

He wants to laugh. If he could breathe, wouldn’t he? Would he be sitting here, staring at crumbling plaster, letting himself die if he could breathe? He can’t breathe, he can’t breathe—

But now the voice isn’t telling him to breathe. The voice is counting, a soft and steady chant of familiar words and numbers… two… three… four… five… There’s a lulling quality to it, and Harry’s brain is still screaming, but not quite as loud as before. The numbers are taking over, weaving into the confusion and smoothing out the edges of his convoluted thoughts carefully, delicately. He’s aware of his eyes and how tightly he’s squinting them, and it doesn’t feel comfortable at all, so he closes them instead. 

There’s a hand on the back of his neck and it’s the anchor he’d been looking for—not overwhelming or claustrophobic, but something steady to keep him grounded. 

The other voices are fading from his brain, and part of him, the most treacherous, dangerous, self-destructive part wants to hold tightly on to the comfort of his mother’s voice, wants to reach it, reach her. But mostly, they’re all being drowned out by the numbers and the calm chant of them, and when his lungs fill with burning air, he almost collapses with relief. 

He’s gasping, he can tell, but there’s the voice again, eerily similar to Draco’s, telling him to breathe, and Harry doesn’t feel quite as cynical about breathing anymore, especially not when the voice gives him a template of exaggerated breaths to copy. 

He does, until his brain quiets completely, the sounds and screams fading away to nothing, the spasms and tremors of his body leaving him with nothing but painful cramps that Harry knows will go away soon enough. 

The room is silent. 

Harry doesn’t want to open his eyes. Doesn’t want to be faced with the white wall again, doesn’t want to think about leaving and how Draco doesn’t want him around anymore. But Harry is nothing if not confrontational, so he opens them anyway. 

There is no wall. There is grey, and there is the delicate sweep of blond eyelashes around them, the arched brows of an aristocratic face, the highs of pink tinged cheekbones. There is no wall, but there is Draco Malfoy and he looks terrified. 

“What the fuck.” 

Harry can’t make his mouth form words, so the sound he emits is a cross between a groan and a laugh. If possible, Draco’s eyes grow even wider. 

“Potter, what was that?” 

“I don’t know,” Harry says. He cringes when his voice comes out scratchy and hoarse, rough around the consonants, breaking on the low sounds of the vowels. “It happens.” 

“It happens?” 

Harry inhales again. One does not learn to covet breath until the air is cut from one’s lungs. Harry wonders how many rich men choking on their wealth would have emptied their vaults for a breath of fresh air. Perhaps many, perhaps none. 

“It happens,” he says, and remains stubbornly silent. 

Draco’s cool mask has been jarred off his face. The sharp angles and slopes of it are twisted in wide-eyed panic and surprise, as though he’s seeing Harry for the first time. 

“Why are you in my room?” Harry asks. “Why did you know… what was happening?” 

“You were screaming,” Draco says, and looks down. Abruptly Harry is aware of the hand still resting on his nape, burning like a brand though Draco doesn’t seem to be aware of it. He shifts in place and waits with bated breath for Draco to jerk away like he has been the entirety of the past week every time their hands have brushed or their shoulders have touched, but Draco simply adjusts his grip subconsciously. 

“I’m not anymore,” Harry points out. Draco looks up at him, and it’s unfair really, how the sight of those wide grey-blue eyes undoes the tightly done up clasps of Harry’s anger and resentment, melting it away into a pool of hurt and resignation. 

“I need to pack,” Harry says, pointedly, and oh, oh, now Draco jerks away from him as though he’s been burned, as though he’s been slapped, as though his world has shifted out from beneath his feet. 

“Where are you going?” Draco asks. The words come out rushed, tripping over each other in a badly practiced dance, as though this combination has never been rehearsed by Draco’s silver tongue. “Why do you need to—?” 

Harry’s tired. He doesn’t know what happened to him but he knows it sunk the weight of his burdens into his bones. “Back to Britain,” he says. “Don’t worry Malfoy, I know when I’m not wanted.” 

Now Draco does look as though someone has slapped him in the face. “Malfoy—?” 

Harry doesn’t have the brainpower to figure out the intricacies of why Draco chose to fixate on the fact that Harry is calling him Malfoy. The memory of Draco’s smile when Harry had called him by his name the first few times flutters to the fore of his thoughts and the pain in his heart twists and pulls on every heartstring. There is no melody to the sound Harry’s soul is making, no more melody than there is in a glass sculpture shattering on the floor. 

“I need to pack,” Harry repeats and Draco’s face falls. His lower lip trembles and his eyebrows furrow and his whole body curls in on itself. Harry figures there should at least be a little bit of pride to be found in reducing Draco Malfoy to this, but even as he searches the darkest, murkiest parts of himself, nothing resembling triumph surfaces. There is only disappointment. 

“Did I do something?” And that voice, the lost, yearning edge of it, the tilt of a hesitant question has Harry’s confidence in his decision sprawling to the very precipice. This is not the voice of a man who wants Harry gone, it’s the voice of one trying to cling to him. 

There is still no pride. 

Harry doesn’t know how to respond so he meets Draco’s eyes and refuses to look away. 

“Tell me,” Draco says—pleads—and Harry can’t hold back. 

“You ignored me,” Harry says. “You won’t talk, you won’t look, you shirk away from me, find excuses to travel on your own. I understand hints Malf—Draco, and I don’t want to stay where someone doesn’t want me.” 

He leaves out everything that not being wanted dredges up, he leaves out the part where leaving will shatter his soul, he leaves out the part where all he wants to do right now is wrap Draco in his arms, fall back into bed and go to sleep without thinking of tomorrow and what fresh horrors it might bring. He leaves out that he was dying and all he could do was stare at a wall. 

Draco’s mouth opens and closes. “I didn’t—” 

“Don’t deny it,” Harry says, because right now, he doesn’t think he can handle Draco’s affinity to cart his mistakes off on the shoulders of everyone but himself. Right now, he needs honesty. “Don’t deny what I saw and what I felt. I’m too much sometimes, I know. You don’t have to explain.” 

He turns, but Draco’s hand shoots out to grip his wrist. 

He’s pale where Harry’s dark, his skin almost translucent. There’s a vein pulsing in the curve of his wrist and his fingers are so long that they completely encircle Harry. There are many inappropriate thoughts to be had about the circumstance but Harry pushes them away. Instead he stares down at where Draco is tightening his hold, almost cutting off Harry’s circulation. 

“I’m sorry,” Draco says, and though Harry has heard him say those words before, they still sound so unfamiliar. A path overgrown with woods, never treaded, being forcefully cleared to make way for Draco’s determination. “I’m sorry, please don’t leave.” 

“Why?” Harry asks, apprehensive and eager in equal measure for Draco’s response. 

He watches the bob of Draco’s Adam’s apple as he swallows. Watches the flutter of his eyelashes as they sweep the delicate skin beneath his eyes. “Because I can’t do this without you.” 

Harry laughs, incredulous and bitter, because _of course_. “I am not here to save your sorry soul, Malfoy,” he says. “I’m not here so you can use me as some sort of mentor when you see fit and then discard me when you decide to ride the coattails of some inexplicable whim. That’s not how this works.” 

“No!” Draco says, eyes wide again. “No, I—I didn’t mean to offend, I didn’t mean to imply you should stay just to save me, I—” He cuts himself off and draws in a deep breath. “I’m learning,” he says eventually. “I’m trying. And I didn’t mean to push you away. I did something I couldn’t forgive myself for and I took it out on you.” 

Draco Malfoy is a coward. He’s a liar at the best of times and pathetic at his worst. But in some moments, when Harry questions every moral he has ever been proud of having, Draco hits him with a bout of such painfully clear honesty that Harry is forced to reevaluate his understanding of the man entirely. 

“What did you do?” he asks, because it seems significant. 

“The walls are thin,” Draco says, which makes no sense because— _oh._

Harry’s mouth is dry. “How thin?” 

“Enough for me to overhear anything you do which makes a sound.” 

“And you heard—” 

“You. A week ago. At night.” 

All of a sudden Draco’s behaviour almost the entirety of the past week becomes crystal clear and Harry almost wishes Draco had kept the information to himself. He can feel the blood rushing to his face, violating the protection from embarrassment his dark skin offers, turning him flushed and red. It’s too hot and Draco is still touching him and Harry would tremble if he didn’t think it would make him lose control over himself entirely. So he reins in every reaction and reflex he can and holds himself steady as he meets Draco’s eyes. 

There are secrets there. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

A small, pink tongue darts out to trace the seam of Draco’s lips. Harry tracks the movement. 

“I—” Draco inhales. “I didn’t want you to stop.” 

That. That can’t be right. That is not what Draco meant, he’s probably just—lost for words. He probably didn’t mean what that sounded like, he probably meant for it to sound as though Draco would feel bad interrupting something so intimate not—

“I joined in.” 

The shame those words are drenched in is a force in itself, the one keeping Draco’s eyes down, the one making his shoulders shake, the one that had him shy away from Harry for a week. Harry licks his own lips and wonders what power he has that is stronger than that shame because Draco should not look this broken for something Harry finds no sin in. 

“I’ll go,” Draco mumbles, loosening his grip around Harry’s wrist when the silence between them has stretched for a little too long. He stands up and looks back towards Harry before turning away and laughing into his hands. It’s a broken, bitter sound, one Harry wants to crush until it dies, until Draco never thinks of making a sound like that again. “Now you have a real reason to leave,” he says and heads for the door. 

Harry’s moving before he registers it, darting out to catch Draco’s wrist this time, his other arm curving around Draco’s slim waist until the other man is standing pressed against him, face etched into an expression of confused surprise as he stares down the three extra inches he has on Harry. 

“What reason?” Harry asks and pulls Draco down for a kiss. 

It’s not electric. It’s not even good, if Harry is being honest. His glasses bump Draco’s nose and Harry’s lips are too chapped. Draco is too surprised to reciprocate in time, and what the kiss ends up being is a smushed collision of their faces at angles faces should not collide. 

Harry pulls away before it can get worse and moves to step away but Draco’s arms come around to grip his waist. His eyes are wide and wondering, his mouth open in an expression of such endearing confusion that Harry has the sudden urge to laugh and kiss the tip of his nose. 

So he does. 

And Draco’s expression scrunches into one even more endearing as he contemplates Harry with total bewilderment. 

“What—?” Draco manages eventually, the word filling the space between them with all the unasked questions. “Harry—?” 

Harry isn’t good with words, not the way Hermione is, or even Draco himself. He’s acceptable when he writes down what he wants to say or when he’s so wound up that words he didn’t know existed in his vocabulary make themselves known. But he has a better track record with actions, so he pulls Draco down for another kiss, taking care to angle their heads right so their lips meet in a gentle, soft collision that doesn’t feel like a hurtling comet but instead like an alignment of the stars. 

It’s not electric. But it is warming and Harry feels it from the tips of his fingers to the backs of his calves to the arch of his neck. Every part of him quiets as Draco brings a hand up to cradle his head. His stomach flips when their mouths part and the kiss goes from chaste to open-mouthed and a little hungry. 

It’s not vicious and violent the way Harry had fantasised. It’s not as passionate as he’d probably like in bed. But in the quiet embrace in the middle of his room with Draco holding him up and him holding Draco up, it’s perfect in the way only unpredictability can be. 

—

Draco promises himself that when he wakes up, he will Pensieve this dream. Harry’s lips under his are warm and a little dry but the heat of their mouths moving together makes up for it. It’s smooth and Draco gasps a little when Harry teases his lower lip with the point of his tongue. Harry smiles against his mouth and Draco wonders how his imagination came up with something so wonderfully perfect. 

Usually, the direction of his thoughts seem to run in a hotter, heavier slide, towards more passionate activities, towards more touch and less gentleness. But this—

This almost feels like reality. 

They pull away after what feels like hours and seconds all at once and Draco stares at Harry, at the green of those eyes, blown a little dark by his dilated pupils, at the kiss swollen curve of his lower lip. His spectacles are a little skewed on his nose and Draco absently fixes the angle of them and only realises what he’s done when Harry’s eyes flutter a little and his expression flickers to one of pleased surprise. 

“You almost feel real,” Draco says. “If we weren’t us, I would believe we did that.” 

He expects Harry to fade away, for his imagination to give up when it realises Draco has caught on. But instead, Harry raises Draco’s fingers to his lips, presses a gentle kiss to the pads of them and says, “Does this feel real?” 

Draco nods, throat clenching, because it does. 

Harry presses another kiss to the inside of Draco’s lips. “This?”

Draco nods again. 

Another one, to the apple of Draco’s cheek, butterfly soft. “How about this?” 

“Real,” Draco says. 

Harry pulls away. “So?” 

“This can’t—” Draco tries, gesturing between them. “You can’t—” 

“I just did.” 

Oh. He just did. He just kissed Draco stupid after Draco confessed to wanking to the sound of him jerking off. He’s solid and real under Draco’s hands and it feels like a blessing Draco does not deserve. 

“Will you still leave?” he asks, the naked hope in his voice verging on embarrassing. He cringes and looks away, but there’s a hand in his hair and another on his cheekbone, rubbing circles into his skin. 

“No,” Harry says. “I was leaving because I thought you didn’t want me.” 

Draco closes his eyes. “You’re you. How could I not?”


	7. Chapter 7

_Our hands touch. Our bodies burst into fire.  
—The Waves, Virginia Woolf_

Harry knocks on Draco’s door, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, dressed haphazardly in jeans and a shirt he bought the previous day when Draco realised that neither him nor Harry packed nearly enough to last them a satisfactory year. It opens, and whatever Harry expects, it is not Parkinson standing in the doorway. 

She looks the way Harry remembers from the battle, but as his eyes catalogue the differences in the time it takes his brain to process the fact that for some reason, Parkinson is _here_ , he notices she looks sleepless, the bruises under her eyes deep and dark. Her hair is longer than it was at Hogwarts, but it’s the awkward length of terrible upkeep that Harry knows all too well and her skin is pale and sallow. 

“Potter,” Parkinson says, and Harry is jarred into reality because now that Draco doesn’t call him that anymore, he’d almost forgotten that is the name most people knew him by. 

“Parkinson,” Harry manages, around the lead in his stomach. If Parkinson is going to spend the rest of Draco’s exile with him, there is absolutely no need for Harry to stay anymore. He steels himself for an eventuality where Draco will politely tell him to make himself scarce and winces internally from the heart-wrenching pain of the thought. 

Draco materialises behind Parkinson, shirtless and doing up his belt and Harry’s eyes widen. Parkinson turns to look over her shoulder and seeing Draco in his state of undress, widens her eyes too, and when Draco looks up to see them staring at him, he turns a little pink and stammers out a curse and they’re three awkward idiots standing in the doorway of an Italian hotel, staring at each other. 

Parkinson breaks the silence. “If I’d known this was what you meant when you said you had matters keeping you busy, I would not have come.” 

“Shut the fuck up, Pans,” Draco hisses and Harry wants to be amused but all he feels is a sick lurch in the pit of his stomach. 

_She’ll turn up like a bad penny, she always does_ , Harry remembers Draco saying. He ought to know better now than to doubt Draco’s knowledge of his friends’ tendencies. 

Harry clears his throat, at a complete loss for what to say. Parkinson looks positively furious. “When I come to meet my best friend in exile, expecting him to be moping around in Florence, trying and failing to look on the sunny side of things, it might have been helpful to know that he had _Harry Potter_ keeping him busy, don’t you think?” 

“Harry Potter isn’t keeping me busy—” Draco sputters and Harry wants to correct him, wants to point out that the week they spent, doing nothing but necking in their beds and occasionally emerging to eat, is keeping busy but Draco didn’t even tell Parkinson he was here. Of all the things Draco wants Parkinson to know, this one cannot be on the list. 

“Well, Harry Potter is right here, so I would have to disagree—” 

“Harry Potter being here was none of your goddamn business Pans—” 

“Stop _calling me Harry Potter!_ ”

Two pairs of eyes, one chilling grey and the other dark turn swivel towards him. “It’s your name,” Parkinson says eventually, the inflection in her tone suggesting that she thinks Harry has gone ‘round the bend. It’s eerily reminiscent of Hogwarts and Harry isn’t in the mood. 

“Indeed it is, Pansy Parkinson,” Harry says, and smirks when she catches on and winces a little. “Why are you here?” 

In the few months that Draco has pulled down most of his defences, Harry had forgotten just how viciously defensive most Slytherins are. “What’s it to you?” Parkinson asks, stressing her vowels so hard she sounds more snake than human. “Am I not allowed to visit my best friend?” 

Well. Harry doesn’t really have an answer to that. He’s glad she didn’t point out the obvious—that it makes more sense for her to be here than Harry. If she did, Harry isn’t sure he could stomach the humiliation. 

“If I’d have known she was coming…” Draco says and trails off when he realises there is no way he could end that statement without offending one or the other of them. “She’s not here for long, right?” 

“I came here because France is buzzing with Saint Potter’s birthday and there are banners in every wizarding neighbourhood proclaiming the joy they feel at the knowledge that the Saviour has lived another year,” Parkinson says. “I trust that you understand Britain will be…” 

“An absolute nightmare,” Harry says, because the mere thought of his first birthday after actually defeating Voldemort being celebrated in Britain hadn’t crossed his mind. Now that it does, he’s exponentially more alarmed by the prospect of having to return. 

Parkinson turns a considering look on him and says, “Potter gets it.” 

Draco throws his hands up in the air and disappears back into the room, hopefully to put on a shirt. Within seconds, he’s back, a black T-shirt creased at the hem just enough to make him appear artfully tousled. Harry and Parkinson stare at each other awkwardly as Draco does his buttons up. 

“Draco’s gay,” Parkinson blurts, suddenly, and all three of them freeze. Draco stares wide-eyed and mortified at the back of her head, Harry stares incredulous and confused at her rapidly reddening face. “I just—” she rushes to clarify, “I just know how it looked when he came out all dishevelled.” 

Draco groans, burying his face in his hand. 

“I know,” Harry says, because there’s nothing else to be said at this point, really. “I’m intimately familiar with his… preferences.” 

Parkinson’s eyes widen and despite the horror churning in his gut at that involuntary revelation, born out of a certain kind of irrational jealousy Harry doesn’t care to admit to, it’s a little funny. Draco almost drops to the ground when she turns on him and screeches, loud enough to wake the whole floor. 

“You little bastard,” she says, aiming a slew of rapid French at Draco. He can’t make out what she’s saying, whether she’s berating him for being an idiot or for not telling her or potentially for both. 

“Pans,” Draco pleads. “Pans, it’s been a bloody week—” 

“A week!” 

“Just a week and it’s Harry’s birthday today, so if we could—” 

“Harry!” 

“Yes, Pans, it’s his birthday and you can come with us, right?” 

Harry realises after an uncomfortable pause that both Draco and Parkinson are staring at him, twin expressions of uncertainty on their faces. 

“Right,” Harry says, slowly, not at all certain what he’s agreeing to. “She’s your friend…” 

Parkinson snarls like a wild animal caught in a trap. “You don’t have to pity me!” she says, jabbing a finger in Harry’s face. “Our holy Saviour, taking pity on the little Hogwarts whore—” 

“Parkinson, what the fuck—” 

“Pans!” Draco’s arms are on Pansy’s shoulders in a flash as he spins her around to face him. “Pans, what is wrong with you? He meant it.” 

The fight drains out of her. “I never—I don’t—” 

“Pans,” Draco says, “He’ll understand.” 

Harry looks between them. “Understand?” 

“Pansy has something to say, don’t you?” Draco asks pointedly. Parkinson scowls at the floor. “Pansy.” 

No one says anything for long minutes. Eventually Draco heaves a disappointed sigh and Harry’s confusion only grows by the minute. “Am I going to be let in on what’s happening anytime soon?” 

A dam bursts within Parkinson. She looks up, jaw clenched, bobbed hair swinging, lower lip wobbling dangerously and says in a harsh, grating whisper, “I’m sorry, alright? For—for what I said. In the battle. I’m sorry. I thought he would win and I thought it was our only hope to stay alive and you were just seventeen and hiding behind your Gryffindors and I thought—” A solitary tear escapes and she wipes it away violently. “I’m sorry. And I didn’t want him to win, I just thought he would. All I wanted was to stay alive.” 

“You were scared,” Harry says. Rage flashes over Parkinson’s features but she nods anyway. “And you did the only thing that you thought you could in the moment.” She nods again. Harry smiles, a little rueful, a little bitter. 

“So did I.” 

—

Draco isn’t certain when it happened, but by the evening of Harry’s birthday, Pansy and Harry aren’t friends, but the ice between them has thawed just enough for the day to have been enjoyable despite the awkwardness. They’d gone out for breakfast which had been derailed enough by a brief bout of rain to become brunch. Pansy had regaled Draco with stories of Blaise’s letters from the USA and Daphne’s attempts to find a job, both of which were sad if you let yourself dwell on reality. Draco finds out Astoria is doing quite well in school and that Pansy’s elder sister is engaged to be married. 

Harry sits at the table, cheek resting on his palm, eyes hooded and glasses a little askew. He looks rumpled and accessible and Draco can’t help but veer closer towards him until their thighs are touching and their pinky fingers are linked under the table. 

Draco’s certain Pansy notices more than she lets on from the other side of the table, but he isn’t about to confront that knowledge. This thing between him and Harry is fragile, a baby bird learning to fly, and up until he’s certain of its strength, Draco wants to shelter it with everything he has. 

“Tell me about you,” Pansy eventually says, when she’s spoken long enough for her voice to go a little hoarse. Dessert arrives on delicate plates, and Draco watches Harry perk up a little. He digs into the treacle tart, licking icing sugar off his lips with a blissed-out look on his face and by the time Draco can steel himself enough to look away, Pansy’s picked up on the little exchange with a slowly growing smirk. 

Draco’s cheeks flame. Pansy drawls, “Leave it be, I think I already know,” and he groans and busies himself with his mousse. 

“You’re gone on him, aren’t you,” Pansy whispers as they walk back towards the hotel. “You’ve gone all daft, staring and blushing and looking away.” 

“He’s not so bad,” Draco whispers back, watching Harry walk a little ahead, absently staring at the pavement. Pansy snorts. 

“If only fourteen-year-old Draco knew that before he made all those badges.” 

He punches her in the arm and she shoots him a faux betrayed look. “How did it even happen?” 

Potter saved me from Fiendfyre, Potter spoke at my trial, Potter took me out for drinks, Potter came with me to Italy, and then Potter became Harry. He doesn’t know how to convey any of that in a manner that does not make this sound incomprehensible and ridiculous, so he shrugs. 

“That’s not a real answer,” Pansy says.

“There isn’t one,” Draco replies and wonders how safe that is. 

— 

Draco doesn’t seem inclined to ask Harry to leave, now that Parkinson’s here. Harry would be relieved by that, but he also doesn’t seem inclined to ask Parkinson to leave, and so when the matter of where to spend the night arises, both Parkinson and Draco begin to look alarmed. 

The receptionist looks among the three of them and lets him know that there are no more extra rooms. Draco offers to put Parkinson up somewhere else, but she acquires a look so terrified on her face at the prospect of being left somewhere alone that Draco eventually sighs and throws his hands up. 

“There’s an easier solution for this,” Parkinson points out. “You both could share in Potter’s and I’ll just stay in yours.” 

Draco swallows. Harry gulps. 

It’s… not that he doesn’t want to. Merlin knows he does. He wants Draco in his bed and from the way Draco’s eyes fill with fraught longing every evening before he leaves, Harry suspects Draco wants that too. But Harry’s Gryffindor courage has deserted him the entirety of the past week and Draco hasn’t brought it up, so they’ve skirted the issue with the sort of ignorant smoothness that can only be achieved by two people trying to avoid the same discussion. 

“It does sound logical,” Draco admits eventually. Harry is forced to concur. 

Parkinson’s eyes widen. Then her smile stretches, until it’s less smile and more teeth. “You both haven’t actually—?” 

“No!” Draco practically shouts. “Pansy, would you shut up?” 

Parkinson holds her hands up, adopting a deceptively innocent expression. “Thank me later,” she says, disappearing into Draco’s room. Draco stares when she slams the door in his face. 

“I’m sorry—” he begins, turning towards Harry but Harry cuts him off with a kiss. It’s been burning through his veins all day, watching Draco in his comfort zone, leaned against the backrest of their restaurant booth, exchanging jibes and insight on their friends with Parkinson. They don’t talk about their friends the way Harry would about his, but there’s an odd fondness in their insults and mockery, an affection that asserts itself in vicious slander and the assurance that it’s allowed. It’s irrationally attractive—Draco’s carefree smile curving his lips, his grey eyes flickering with mirth. 

This kiss isn’t rough, but it’s a little biting, filled with the promise of more. Pressed against the closed door to his own room, Harry wonders what fourteen-year-old Harry would think, knowing he would one day kiss and be kissed by Draco Malfoy and enjoy it. Nothing good, but it’s an interesting idea. 

When the handle starts digging into his back, Harry pulls away, flustered and a little dazed. They enter, and Harry is glad he didn’t leave his underwear on the floor before leaving today morning. His bed is a little untidy but he doubts Draco cares when he’s pressed up once again against the wall. 

This kiss fulfils some of the promises, eventually evolving into a line of hot, open-mouthed kisses being pressed down the column of Harry’s bared throat and as he closes his eyes and revels in the warm, wet heat of Draco’s mouth teasing at the sensitive skin, Parkinson’s arrival seems like a godsend. 

Draco’s cheeks hollow and fill under Harry’s palm as he sucks a bruise into the juncture between Harry’s shoulder and his neck, a sensitive spot that never fails to have Harry writhing just a little, letting control slip through his fingers like water. He sinks his hands into Draco’s hair, holding him in place, shoving his head back against the wall, uncaring as it smarts from the thud. 

Before he can groan in pleasure, Draco moves away lightning fast, one hand clenched tight in Harry’s hair, the other slapped over Harry’s mouth. “Thin walls,” he whispers and Harry groans anyway. 

“Silencing Charm,” he says, frustrated. Draco fiddles in his pocket for his wand, and Harry, who has had enough of the delays and the derailments, flicks his fingers, whispering, “ _Muffliato._ ” Immediately, the world descends into silence, the call of crickets and traffic outside drowned out by the bonds of magic. 

Draco’s eyes are blown dark. “That was…” 

Harry smiles, because he’d hoped it would have that reaction. “Kiss me,” he says. Draco obliges willingly, dipping his head and pulling Harry into another kiss that has Harry weak and trembling at the knees. He tucks an errant lock of hair behind Draco’s air and revels in the little surprised hitch of his breath. Draco is always taken aback by gentleness—a hand curving around his waist, fingers filling the space between his, a soft kiss pressed to his sharp cheek—but his reactions make it worth it. 

By the time they make it to the bed, they’re so tangled up in each other that Harry can’t tell where he begins and Draco ends. He knows that his lips are kiss-swollen and heavy, he knows that his soul has been set on fire, he knows that Draco’s mouth is far too skilled for life to be fair. 

They pull away for a moment, just to catch their breaths, foreheads resting against each other’s, breaths mingling in the tight, warm space between their mouths, where everything feels safe. 

Draco clears his throat and Harry meets his eyes. “About what Pansy said…” he says, flushing a little pink. 

“It makes logical sense,” Harry says, diplomatically, echoing Draco’s earlier words. Draco scowls. 

“I’m not _talking_ about _logical sense._ ” 

“Well then, you’ll have to be more specific, won’t you—” 

“Don’t make me do this, Potter—” 

“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about—” 

“You absolute menace,” Draco says, biting down on his exposed earlobe. “Bumping uglies, Potter,” he says, startling a laugh out of Harry. “Buggering, doing the do, the old in and out—” 

Harry pushes him away, laughing. “Now, even if I was about to agree—” 

“Were you?” Draco asks, expression suddenly sober and serious. He doesn’t look upset, but he looks… determined. 

Harry looks at him and is almost surprised by the lack of embarrassment. “Yeah,” he says. 

The smile on Draco’s face makes every decision worth it.

—

Contrary to what Draco had feared would happen, they don’t immediately strip each other and proceed to bang it out. He knows he wants to go further, but he isn’t sure he’s quite _there_ yet. He wants to feel Harry’s skin, experiment with his sensitivities, seek out what makes him keen and arch and moan. He’s not sure he wants to shove his dick anywhere and be done with it. 

Contrary to popular perception and the carefully cultivated image throughout his Hogwarts years, Draco doesn’t like the sort of sex that leaves you lonely the morning after, the too fast, slick slide of skin against skin, the thrusting and the wild abandon. 

Well, sure, he _likes_ it, but he likes other things more. 

Harry doesn’t move to undo his buttons immediately. His hands linger on the exposed skin of Draco’s nape, the planes of his face, the curve of his wrist and the sliver of skin where his shirt has ridden up a little. Harry’s hands are warm and dry, and they’re bigger than Draco’s. Something about the exploratory journey they venture on across the valleys and ravines of Draco’s body makes the moment feel infinite. They could stretch this moment like toffee and lose themselves in the aether, tangled up in each other, requiring nothing for the rest of all eternity. 

They kiss more, mouths opening like winter roses under a radiant sun, and when Harry huffs a very gentle laugh into Draco’s mouth, Draco drinks it in like nectar. Harry is sweet, soft where Draco had not expected him to be so, tough in places where Draco needs him to be. He loses track of how much time he’s spent, tangled in the sheets of Harry’s bed, smelling the clean shampoo of Harry’s hair. 

Harry breathes like a broken dream, all shattered edges as he devastates Draco with the push and pull of his whole being and Draco clings to him, the tidal surge of want crashing over them like an ocean. 

There’s a fire, but it’s not wild. There’s passion but it doesn’t drown. If this is what letting go feels like, Draco will fall forever. 

Harry’s hand slides up his chest, under his shirt, pressing against the pulse of Draco’s beating heart. It’s not a sexual touch, but Draco welcomes it, holds on to it, lets it anchor him. 

“Can I take this off?” Harry asks, stroking the collar of Draco’s shirt. He’s heard from others how questions make sex boring, how the moment should be too intense for words when it’s right. But this moment right here—Draco cannot imagine one more perfect. The question ruins nothing, merely fuels their desire further. What shame is there in such a blatant expression of desire? 

Draco learns, with every undone button and short, steady nod when Harry’s eyes flicker to his for affirmation and reaffirmation of his agreement, that there is no ruination in consent. 

He gives it freely, enthusiastically, over and over again, the _yes, yes, yes_ , falling from his lips like offerings and Harry accepts it with caresses and warm touches and more questions and quiet smiles like the god he is. 

There is an altar, and Draco, who has never seen the point of religion, finally understands the merit of worship. 

—

By the time he tugs Draco’s T-shirt off his shoulders, Draco’s hands have come up to grip his. “Can I?” he asks, an each of Harry’s words from earlier, reverent and wondering, and Harry gasps his assent. Draco goes faster than he did, undoing the buttons with efficiency, but the moment Harry’s shirt falls away to reveal his chest, Draco’s hands slow their movements to a snail’s pace, exploratory fingers running over the curves of his ribs, the muscles of his abdomen. 

Draco flicks a nipple, a little cautious, a little wary and Harry wants to smooth that expression away with a kiss, with a touch, but he can’t bring his limbs to cooperate because he’s too busy losing himself to the sensation of it. Draco does it again and again and again until Harry is a mess against the sheets, gripping Draco’s biceps agonisingly tightly to keep himself grounded. 

“You’re so responsive,” Draco mutters, and then—“Can I take your pants off?” 

“Yes,” Harry says, voice breathy and hoarse and he almost loses it when Draco’s long fingers fall from his chest down to his button and fly, pulling down, down, down, until Harry is naked. 

Draco’s hands immediately trace across the outside of his thigh, a reassuring gentle touch and the immediate flush of exposure fades into the warm embrace of safety. Harry never thought his first time doing this would be with Draco Malfoy, but now that he has it, he wouldn’t trade it for the world. 

“You’re beautiful,” Draco whispers, in the same awestruck voice that he’d used to say _you’re so responsive_ and Harry digs his fingers into Draco’s shoulders to stave off the whine that threatens to erupt from his throat. 

“Have you done this before?” Harry asks, because he needs to know. He hasn’t, hasn’t had the time or the inclination before this, before Draco Malfoy’s pale throat became accessible and his long fingered hands became something to be held. 

“Not all the way,” Draco says. “You?” 

Harry shakes his head, shutting his eyes. He doesn’t want to ruin the moment, he doesn’t want to push Draco away with his inexperience, but Draco simply reaches over to press a kiss to his closed eyelids and says, low and comforting, “First time for everything.” 

“Okay,” Harry breathes out, shakily. “Okay.” 

“What do you want?” Draco asks, quiet and soothing. “Tell me what you want?” 

Harry hesitates. His thoughts are a jumbled mess, a constant, aching scream of _Draco, Draco, Draco_. But he sorts through them just enough to comprehensively say, “Your hands. Your mouth. Whatever you’re willing to give.” 

Draco’s eyes darken. “Everything,” he says, and Harry wonders, for one spectacularly wild moment if anyone back home in Britain is imagining in their wildest dreams that Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy are about to spend the night together. 

He reckons they aren’t. It’s a freeing thought. There are no expectations tying him down for this. He can just be and Draco will let him fall. Draco will catch him and if he can’t, they will fall together into whatever awaits. 

“I’m ready,” Harry says, though he doesn’t know what he’s ready for. He knows that whatever Draco wants to give him right now, he will accept. He’s ready, and perhaps, he’s always been ready for Draco Malfoy. 

“Okay,” Draco says, leaning over to press a softly sweet kiss to his cheek. It’s vulnerability leaches through Harry’s fogged over and lust hazy brain and he smiles, a little drunk and more than a little ecstatic. 

Draco’s hand curls around Harry’s cock, and he realises that somewhere, Draco had slicked it with lube. It’s probably Conjured because it doesn’t smell like anything at all, but the slide of it is exquisite along the length of Harry’s dick. Harry’s eyes roll back a little as frissons of pleasure tingle across his spine, down his abdomen, raising the short hairs along the nape of his neck. He goes slow at first, long, tight slides of his soft palm. When he can’t take the slow-burning pleasure of it any longer, he bites into Draco’s shoulder, the easiest accessible part of Draco and moans. 

Draco gasps when he does it, whether in surprise or in pleasure, Harry can’t be arsed to care. But Draco starts going just a little faster, enough for the buildup to happen in a curling roll of pleasure rising from the very tip of Harry’s toes, gaining traction in his stomach as he arches his back from the touch, becoming almost unbearable as it tightens his balls and spills from his cock onto Draco’s hand. 

Harry’s trembling from it, shaking on the bed and when he squints to look at Draco, Draco’s expression is tight with arousal and wonder. 

“You’re spectacular,” Harry says, raising a hand to cup Draco’s cheek, post-orgasmic lassitude loosening his tongue. “That was bloody brilliant.”

Draco smiles, his heartbreaking smile, all angles softened by it. “Give me a minute,” Harry says, staring at it, unable to look away. He wants that smile to fall apart under his ministrations, segueing into an expression of open-mouthed pleasure. He wants to see how many of Draco’s angles soften with orgasm and how many of his muscles clench. He wants to count the stars that appear in Draco’s eyes when he looks at Harry in the aftermath, constellations worthy of a man named after the skies. “I want to learn to suck you off.”


	8. Chapter 8

_“Here, take the space where my heart goes  
I give that to you too”  
—Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas; “Valentines”, Henry Dumas_

Harry learns to suck Draco off. 

Pansy leaves in three days, and Harry’s relationship with her improves significantly. By the time she’s leaving, she’s progressed to the point where the hug between them is awkward but not stiff, where a parting smile is natural, not offensively mocking. 

They spend their days exploring Florence, the unknown parts, the seedier back alleys, the cobblestones stained with memory and history. 

They spend their nights exploring each other. 

August passes in a haze of summer sunshine and Harry’s brown skin turning gold in it. They find new cafes to love and new waitresses who speak broken and accented English. The receptionist at their little motel is now a regular fixture of their mornings and they’ve both taken to wishing her a very good morning when they leave the keys to their room with her for safekeeping. 

On some mornings, they choose to stay in bed, just talking. Draco finds out about the parts of Granger that are not stuffy and boring. He discovers that Weasley is apparently some sort of Chess Master, a fact Harry is endlessly bitter about. He learns that Ginevra and Harry fell out before Harry disappeared for their seventh year and that after, they never managed to pick back up. He learns that Harry did not just leave friends behind in Britain, but his family. 

Draco has little to offer that does not sour the mood. But he tries anyway. He filters his happiest memories for the ones that seem appropriate, the ones that are not tainted by prejudice and privilege. There are few, but they are precious. So he tells Harry about Blaise and Theo, about his own pride in seeing his friends happy, about the time he and Pansy went wine tasting in the Manor’s wine cellars and got blind drunk at thirteen. 

He tells Harry that he likes to fix things, work with his hands and his wand, find the chinks in magic’s armour and fill them with metal. He knows they both remember the Vanishing Cabinet and Draco is almost certain that Harry will rebuff him or lecture him but Harry places a hand over his clenched fist and says nothing at all. 

Draco learns that there is pride to be taken in skill. 

Harry gets angry sometimes. They pick fights over small things and end them over larger declarations of vulnerability and hurt. Draco goes blank sometimes, the cynicism he inculcated as a survival tactic resurfacing to rip his progress to shreds. Harry doesn’t allow it, stitching his reformation back with quips and cutting comments and patience flavoured with gentleness. Draco learns to seek him out when the precipice feels too close and Harry learns the best ways to walk them both backwards. 

The day Harry haltingly tells him about his Muggle relatives, Draco asks, voice harsh and words cutting, why, precisely, Harry doesn’t agree with Draco’s established notion that Muggles are filthy dogs. Which leads to a disappointed glare from Harry who reminds him that Hermione’s parents, who gifted him books and vouchers are also Muggle, and that his grandparents had been Muggles and the receptionist who gave them a discount on the price of their room is also a Muggle. 

Draco feels a little ashamed. 

He does not want to tell Harry about Voldemort’s time in the Manor. Maybe someday, but the wounds are still fresh and on Draco’s worst days, when nothing makes sense and he misses home, they bleed him dry. 

The first of September is one of Draco’s worst days. 

He knows from the get-go that it’s bad. He wakes up, too hot and restless, but limbs too heavy to move. Harry’s head is pillowed on his chest, a delicate weight on most days. Today it feels stifling in the way a lover’s touch should not. 

He would push Harry away and apologise, ask for a little space and catch his breath. He knows Harry would understand, would bring a hand to hover over his eyebrow before removing it and walking away, no touch of disappointment in his movements, understanding shrouding his eyes. He knows Harry and Harry is kind in unfathomable ways. But he can’t bring his hands to cooperate. 

His whole body feels heavy and weighted, like a drowning body with stones tied to the legs. His brain is still undecided between overwrought with worry and completely blank, a strange flickering juxtaposition that leaves him overwhelmed as he lies on the bed, blinking up at the white ceiling, trying not to choke on the overwhelming sweetness of Harry’s shampoo. 

It’s a nightmare and Draco can’t escape. There is no waking up from the cold reality of daylight. 

That thought is a shortcut to flashbacks, the memories of the Manor, of one too many _Crucio_ s aimed at his legs, of pain and of humiliation, of the naked desperation of being a boy in a house full of rabid dogs. He blinks and the white walls of the motel room fade until he’s a ghost in the Manor, locked in a mindscape of memories. 

Red eyes. Red lights. Red, thick blood pooling around the raised lines of the Dark Mark. Red pride and red passion, whirling, whirling, whirling into red shame. 

He blinks and he’s back in the motel, lying under a heavy duvet, still unable to move. Harry is hovering over him, face scrunched into an expression of such acute worry that Draco wants to pull him closer, wants to smooth it out, wants to wipe it clean. 

All he can do is blink. 

“Can you talk?” Harry asks when he cottons on to Draco’s mental state. 

Draco tries. His throat does not cooperate. He blinks again and Harry understands. 

“Okay,” Harry says, immediately soothing and comforting. “That’s okay. Can you move your head? Even a little?” 

Draco tries. With maximum effort, he can make himself nod in assent. It’s draining, but it’s a morsel of control that Draco clings to for dear life. 

“Do you need me to leave?” Harry asks, and oh, the question hurts because Draco doesn’t really want Harry to leave, but Harry staying is a trigger for the memories of a strange boy with a swollen face sitting in his living room, held at wand-point by Snatchers. 

Draco nods, though it pains him to do so.

Harry’s up and off him in a flash. At the doorway he pauses, far enough to be safe, near enough to be heard. “Take your time,” he says, words careful. “The world will wait.” 

Draco closes his eyes and tries his best to believe Harry. 

—

Draco’s episode lasts well into the next day. On the 2nd of September, Draco emerges from his room to rap softly on Harry’s door, clothes dirty, body smelling of sweat and anxiety. Harry runs him a bath and leaves him be, and tries not to be too surprised when Draco comes out of it, towel wrapped around his skinny waist and falls face first into Harry’s bed. 

“Sorry,” he says. 

“What for?” Harry frowns. 

Draco makes a vague hand gesture. Harry grows a tad exasperated, mouth pinching. “Why are you apologising?” 

“That was… probably worrying. And completely uncalled for. And I couldn’t warn you, it happened so suddenly—” 

“Because episodes announce themselves weeks in advance, is that it? They book appointments and carefully put you out of commission on weekends so that you don’t have to attend that terribly elitist costume party where everyone will be gossiping about the newly engaged couple and the host’s investments.” 

Draco is quiet for a minute before he laughs a little.

“I see what you mean,” he says. 

“Do you.” 

Draco shrugs a little, a drop of water sliding off the edge of his shoulder onto the bedsheets. “I woke up and I couldn’t move. I didn’t plan it.” 

“Shit, Draco,” Harry says, scrubbing his hand over his face. “We were in a _war._ ” 

“Opposite sides,” comes Draco’s muffled voice. 

“Who cares?” Harry demands. “Who cares about the sides? Do you mean to tell me Voldemort was an angel? Paid you rent? Bellatrix never used up all the hot water—” 

They’re laughing. “Shut up, Potter,” Draco says, and Harry doesn’t want to. “Dolohov probably washed your dishes, Greyback, oh Greyback, did he go hunting, put food on the table—” 

“If you count what he put on the table as food—” 

“Did Yaxley sweep the floors—” 

“Dear Merlin, Potter, what are elves for—” 

Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees Draco turn around to lie flat on his back on the bed. He still looks tired, but the laughter is brightening him, a candle glowing stronger by the second. 

“I missed you,” Harry says, because he did. Because after a month of sleeping curled into Draco’s warmth in his bed, his own had felt so cold, so numb, so unbearable. Because Draco’s silence on the other side had been terrifying enough that Harry had almost burst in a couple of times but didn’t, digging half moons into his palms before biting off the nails. 

Draco stops laughing. “And I you,” he says quietly. He looks to be verging on another apology and Harry is sick of it. 

“Your trauma is not something you can schedule into a planner, Draco. These things happen. I get nightmares and I wake up paralysed. I get panic attacks and I forget where I am. Some mornings are not made to be mornings on which we can move. There are weights even we can’t bear.” 

“I didn’t want to push you away.” Draco sounds upset, like he genuinely believes needing a little space to have an episode is pushing Harry away. Something unforgivable. 

He says as much. “You didn’t,” he concludes when Draco doesn’t say anything. “You told me what you needed and I gave it to you.” 

“Okay,” Draco says, and he still sounds a little unconvinced but it’s a few steps in the direction of progress from the standpoint of absolute denial so Harry counts it as a victory. 

“You must be starving,” Harry says, because he’s pretty sure Draco hasn’t eaten anything since Harry woke up, plastered to his sweaty chest, seeing his eyes open and unseeing, frozen in a limbo Harry couldn’t drag him out of. 

“A little.” 

“Let’s go,” he says, tugging on Draco’s arm. “Get dressed, we’ll go out to eat.” He remembers and hastily adds, “Only if you want to, of course. If you’re not feeling up to it—” 

“No, we’ll go,” Draco says, hauling himself out of bed. “I feel a little…” He gestures towards his head in an expansive fashion that could mean anything but Harry takes to mean overwhelmingly restless. 

Harry shrugs in assent. 

Draco pauses on his way to the door, towel still slung around his hips, hair wet and a little, nervous smile playing at his lips. 

“I don’t…” he begins, looking down at his hips. “I can’t… Oh Merlin. Can I—Can I borrow your clothes?” 

Harry stares at him. 

Draco blushes bright red, up to the tips of his ears. “Sorry, stupid question, I’ll go change—” 

“For fuck’s sake,” Harry interrupts before Draco can actually leave. “Yes. Of course. Always.” 

Draco’s smile is bright enough to light the sky on fire. 

—

“Are we dating?” Harry asks at the diner, sandwich halfway to his mouth. Draco pauses, straw heavy on his tongue as he sips at the Coke Harry had insisted on buying. He doesn’t really know how to answer. 

Dating seems… inadequate, if he’s being honest. Dating is weekly coffee shops and a kiss against a lamppost, dating is shy smiles and playing footsie under the table, dating is chocolates and taking someone home after enough good evenings spent in their company to spend a better night. Dating is everything delicate and frivolous and happy that Draco can’t imagine for himself anymore. 

Draco was so broken before he met Harry. Not Harry Potter, but this Harry who cracks terrible jokes across diner tables and talks him down from his anxious highs, Harry who chews his bottom lip when he writes his friends letters, Harry who sleeps curled into the space between his shoulder and his throat every night. Dating doesn’t seem a big enough word to hold what they are together. Dating bursts at its seams when Draco tries to imagine shoving themselves into its constraints, like an overstuffed pillow groaning under the weight of too much cotton and belligerence. 

“No,” he says very carefully, heart clenching as Harry’s face falls. “We’re… together.” 

Harry’s eyes brighten and his expression goes from disappointed to surprised to ridiculously pleased as the light drifts into his eyes indicating he’s figured it out. 

Together is big enough. Together is limitless. Together could mean anything and could mean nothing, could mean the moans that mingle against the bedsheets at night or the innocent handholding in the streets of Florence, or the causal banter they exchange over morning coffee. Together is perfect, twining them both into an embrace and letting them stay there. 

No pressure. Draco can breathe. 

“Have you told your friends about me?” Draco asks. His friends know. He knew they’d find out from the very moment Pansy had shown up on the doorstep of his room, wand tucked into her hair, looking sharp and observant as she took in Draco’s every move. They’d written to him, some longer missives—Blaise’s rambling eloquence spilling into a three part letter, Astoria’s detailed descriptions of her year at Hogwarts, a couple paragraphs dedicated to wishing him well—some short, barely a line—Theo’s ‘good for you’ and Millicent’s ‘Finally’. 

Greg doesn’t write and Draco tries to not take it personally, tries to not let it sting the swollen part of his heart that still mourns Crabbe with every breath. Vince had been stupid, Vince had been destructive and hurtful and pigheaded until the very end, but Draco had loved him, a friend and a brother and when he’d been eaten by Fiendfyre, Draco’s childhood had been buried with him. 

Harry’s ears tint a little pink. “Ron and ‘Mione know the… gist of it. They don’t get it, not really and I understand that, but they know and they love me so they won’t… make a deal of it right now.” 

Draco reels a little with surprise. He knows Harry isn’t the type, but part of him had expected to be the filthy little secret. A hidden away toy, a written off friendship. But Harry told… told… the other two thirds of the Golden Trio about it and it sparks something in his heart that spirals from a match into a wildfire. 

He’s burning for Harry, all warmth and light and wonder and combustion has never tasted quite this much like salvation. 

“I didn’t tell the Burrow yet,” Harry continues, biting into the sandwich. “The Weasleys, I mean. There’s too much to unpack there, and I don’t… romance isn’t…” 

Draco understands. “I haven’t told my mother, yet.” 

Harry nods in acknowledgement. They both have people they love to tell, but not everyone is in a place to know.

“This is good, you know?” Harry says, gesturing between them without meeting Draco’s eyes. “This… us. Whatever. It’s… I didn’t expect it, but you’re—good. Yeah.” 

Draco almost chokes on his sandwich. 

“You’re kidding right?” 

Harry frowns. “I’m not joking, I—” 

“Merlin,” Draco whispers. “Merlin, Harry you can’t just tell me—” 

“But you are—” 

“You’re not allowed to say things like that to me—” 

“You can’t just tell me I’m not allowed to—” 

“Fucking Merlin, Potter, you’re… glorious!” Draco ultimately says, throwing his hands up. “You… don’t just get to call me good when you’re kind and brilliant and deserving of literally anyone who isn’t me!” 

Harry stares. 

“You actually believe that,” he says after a pause. 

Draco exhales. He doesn’t need to answer, the answer is in the tense muscles of his jaw, in the rapid, shallow breaths he’s taking, in the fear he’s trying to swallow back down. 

“You’re a dick, Draco,” Harry says. “Yeah, you’re not always kind and brilliant or whatever but I… you care. You’re trying and it’s made a difference and the person you are is not the person you were and I’m actually liking the person I’m getting to know. He’s funny and he’s careful and he’s honest and he’s really bloody good in bed—” 

Draco can feel the blush creeping up–

“–and he’s an ex-Death Eater. I don’t care. Not really, not the way you apparently think I should.” 

“Okay,” Draco says after a few minutes of silence. That’s a common word in his repertoire now, a filler for the times when Harry’s grace leaves him speechless and spellbound. “Okay.” 

“Okay?” Harry asks, reaching a hand across the table, palm turned upwards.

“Okay,” Draco says again, and takes it.


	9. Chapter 9

_"Meet me in Istanbul,"  
I'll say, and they will.  
—Next Time, Joyce Sutphen_

They go to Rome in November. 

It’s cold, and Harry is hauled into more than twelve shops to buy appropriate winter wear because apparently his coat and his jacket and his Transfiguration skills are not enough when it comes to Draco Malfoy’s posh tastes. 

He can see the way it hurts Draco to be more frugal with his money, how he shies away from certain price ranges, how his face goes dark before going resigned when he sees a particular coat. He’s not poor—Merlin no—but Harry knows Voldemort’s stay had not been easy on the Malfoy vaults and the Ministry’s ensuing punishments and fines have been even harder. 

They have vaults in France too, but Draco can’t access them yet because his father still hasn’t signed the necessary papers or died for Draco to have unfettered access. 

But mainly, it just jars Harry to see Draco Malfoy not throw Galleons at whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Harry picks up the slack a little, buying Draco some of the more expensive things, gifting them with a shrug and a light blush. 

Sometimes Draco screams about charity, at other times he kisses Harry stupid and fucks him into the mattress wearing nothing but whatever garment Harry bought him. If that isn’t motivation enough to keep buying him things, Harry doesn’t know what is. 

It’s great. 

Rome is magnificence unparallelled. San Gimignano had been a watercolour painting, all soft edges and smiling people, pretty street corners and trellised windows. Florence had been a sculpture, lifelike and gorgeous, artistic and fascinating. 

Rome is an oil painting, vibrant and bold, an experience in existence, history binding its cobblestones tight. They take long walks through the streets at night, the warm glow of the lampposts turning the sidewalks golden. It feels like a different era and Harry finds himself patting down his pockets for errant time-turners. 

Rome is a king, and Draco is a prince, and Harry is a happy voyeur watching a kingdom thrive before his eyes. 

Draco seems happier here than he did in Florence or in San Gimignano. There, he had been burdened by the weight of his exile and the weight of nostalgia. Here he exists, the shell of the old Draco Malfoy falling away to reveal the man who gets excited by history, by the prospect of passing by Keats’ house, marvels open-mouthed at the marble steps and stone archways. 

Rome is a city of restored ruins and Harry, who is something of a restored ruin himself, appreciates the pride that clings to every battle worn stone. 

Hermione had told him to travel and Harry hadn’t known what he’d been signing himself up for when he’d agreed. But if travel is this, then Harry will gladly travel for the rest of his life. 

Home is a feeling, and Harry is finding it in the recesses and healed parts of his own heart. 

Draco holds his hand here more, clings to his side, pulls him this way and that, reads every word on the plaques of every building, catalogues them away in that wondrous brain of his. Not for the first time, Harry thinks how well Hermione and Draco would get along if they got to know each other. He mentions it to Draco and Draco’s ears turn a little pink and he mumbles something abstract and uncatchable about how he hopes to do better by her later and Harry understands what he means when Hermione’s next letter comes. 

_He wrote to me, _she writes and she doesn’t need to say who he is because Harry catches on immediately. _Said he would like to apologise and help in any way he can once we’re both back in Britain. Said a great deal about how he would like to help on any project and that he now understands the merits of the causes I champion. He said you taught him to value it.___

__His heart had throbbed painfully in his throat._ _

___I’m proud of you_ , she’d written before signing off, and he’d smudged the words with tears. _ _

__Oh Draco, my Draco._ _

__Draco hadn’t mentioned it or brought it up, so Harry leaves it be, unsure how to broach it without triggering a bomb in a minefield. It’s sensitive and it’s between Draco and ‘Mione and Harry feels the stirrings of emotions stronger than the easy likability they’ve established in their relationship. He hadn’t allowed himself to dwell too much on the possibility of Draco and his friends hating each other, hadn’t allowed himself to contemplate a future in which Draco, rapidly becoming an important fixture in his life would not be able to coexist with the other most important fixtures in his life._ _

__And yet, Draco had taken it upon himself to do whatever he could to resolve the issue and Hermione, wonderful, kind, forgiving Hermione chose to meet him halfway. He doesn’t know how Hermione responded or how Ron took it, but he does know that at eleven, his judgement had been impeccable._ _

__There was a war, and now there isn’t. There was death and now there’s life. There was feeling like a stranger in his own skin and now there is home._ _

__—_ _

__They’re walking, a little distance away from the Colosseum, not holding hands but shoulders touching. Harry’s smiling and Draco’s smiling, the sun is warm and golden and the winter chill is pleasant._ _

__There’s a group of boys cycling by, their laughter a little too boisterous and an edge to it that makes Draco’s teeth set on edge but Harry beside him is relaxed, so Draco puts his paranoia on hold._ _

__Until they pass them, a swarm of locust-like men, their smiles nasty and their words harsher and despite their accented English, Draco hears the slur loud and clear._ _

__It’s thrown at Harry and Draco almost gasps from the physical flinch that ripples through Harry’s body, sending him crashing into Draco’s side as though putting distance between the horde and himself will save him from the viciousness of the word._ _

__Inside his head, Draco reimagines his casual distaste of the word, the shrugged acceptance of it being in use among the Muggles who don’t know better than to discriminate based on something as arbitrary as skin colour when they themselves are of inferior blood. Inside his head, the word and his encounters with it are reshaped and reimagined in the light of Harry’s full-bodied, visceral reaction, the sharp expression of pain and chastened hatred lancing across his handsome features._ _

__The boys cycle away, laughing and shouting, but Harry stands still on the sidewalk, trembling and shuddering from the assault of unknown demons, eyes clenched shut and body swaying like a dandelion stem._ _

__Draco reaches for him but Harry bodily shirks away and Draco uncomfortably shoves his hands deep into his pocket._ _

__“Let’s go back to the hotel,” Draco says, thanking his ancestors that they haven’t wandered too far from it in the first place. “You can—We’ll put on some music or something.”_ _

__Harry doesn’t respond so Draco turns around and walks a couple of steps, turning back to check if Harry is following. He isn’t._ _

__“Harry,” he says, the undertone of desperation gripping his words sounding panicked even to his own ears. “Harry, come with me.”_ _

__Harry looks at him and Draco almost has to bodily jerk away from the dead-eyed gaze. It’s not Harry, it’s Harry’s body and there’s nothing left inside._ _

__He doesn’t want to touch, but there is no way to get Harry back to where words can’t slice through him like knives, so he pulls his reluctant hands out of his pocket and tugs on Harry’s scarf._ _

__“Potter, come with me,” he says, tugging on the scarf with increased desperation. Harry shrugs and moves forward._ _

__Sighing with relief, Draco starts walking beside him, trying not to dwell on the fact that Harry beside him feels less person and more machine, every step measured and mechanical, face devoid of expression, eyes devoid of light._ _

__—_ _

__Harry is in Privet Drive._ _

__He’s standing at the gate, knuckles white around the iron, tiny arm weak from the clenched position he’s been holding for hours. He doesn’t want to go inside, to the cupboard, to Petunia, to Dudley, to Uncle Vernon._ _

__Part of it is because he doesn’t want to be shouted at. Part of it is because he doesn’t want to be seen._ _

__Uncle Vernon calls him names. Harry hadn’t understood them for years, but he does now. Uncle Vernon calls him names because Harry isn’t pale-skinned like them, because Harry doesn’t tan in the sun, because Harry’s hair is different from theirs and the shape of his mouth is like the other girl in his class who looks a little like him but worlds apart._ _

__Aunt Petunia mutters under her breath about how much he looks like his father and Harry wants to cry because he doesn’t want to believe his father was a bad man, but he’s been told over and over that he was and isn’t Harry a lucky boy to not have that kind of influence in his life?_ _

__Sometimes Harry wants to burn his skin off. He’s seen the way burnt skin is lighter, he’s seen it on one of his teachers. If Harry comes back lighter, will they love him? Will Aunt Petunia buy him a candle for Christmas? Harry can live in the cupboard, he doesn’t mind, he knows he doesn’t deserve a room, but in winter it gets so cold._ _

__It would be so nice to have a candle._ _

__—_ _

__Draco sits Harry down on the edge of their bed. He regrets not having booked two rooms now, regrets that there is only one bed in the room, regrets that Harry never prepared him for this catatonic eventuality._ _

__This isn’t a panic attack, Draco knows to some extent how to deal with those. Harry is breathing, Harry is blinking, Harry is moving. He doesn’t look the way he did the day they first kissed, out of breath and silent._ _

__Now he looks… blank. A slate wiped clean, a pencilled drawing erased._ _

__It unnerves Draco beyond belief._ _

__“Harry?” he tries again, because he needs to. There is no response._ _

__Harry is still wearing his outdoor clothes, sneakers laced up and scarf wound tight around his neck. Draco kneels and starts undoing the laces of Harry’s sneakers. Tries not to let the panic consume him. He keeps from touching the bare expanse of skin around Harry’s ankle to the best of his ability, holding Harry’s socked foot delicately as he tugs the shoes off. Harry doesn’t move, doesn’t cooperate. Doesn’t register what is happening._ _

__He’s sitting, a rag doll with its strings cut, and Draco unwinds the scarf from around his throat and tosses it over the chair to the side. He doesn’t know what to do, but he thinks Harry needs to sleep, needs to get whatever this is shocked out of his system._ _

__The word the boys had so carelessly flung at him feels like a demon. Every memory he has of speaking slurs himself is a painful, aching, open wound. He doesn’t know how Granger could contemplate forgiving him. If Harry ever wanted to forgive that strange Italian boy, Draco would scream with frustration._ _

___There is courage on the side of the light,_ his mother had told him when he’d finally lost all faith in the Dark Lord. _There is resilience and there is bravery. And most of all, there is hope.__ _

__He understands it better now, his mothers words. Harry, Granger, Weasley, the hundreds of others Draco has tormented and taunted and bullied, live with trauma and grief within them that when triggered can send the world to its knees._ _

__And they still wake up every morning and find it in themselves to smile._ _

__The bile rises sharp in his throat and he swallows it down. Privilege makes more sense than Draco wants it to. He remembers how Harry often emphasises his privilege as a ‘white boy in a racist world’. He hadn’t realised the weight of it before._ _

__He wants to wash himself clean but he doubts he will ever rid himself of the filthy feeling of knowing he contributed to this. He imagines Granger in the same slouched position Harry is in as a consequence of his words, remembers her echoing screams as Bellatrix carved her arm up with a silver knife, remembers Weasley being held back every time his friends were insulted._ _

__Abruptly, Draco wishes Harry and Granger hadn’t held back Ronald Weasley’s potent furiousness all those years. He deserved more than Granger’s open handed slap in third year, more than Potter’s taunting in Hogsmeade, more than Sectumsempra even._ _

__Until he realises, this is what sets them all apart. They don’t waste time doing a post-mortem of what they or other people deserve, they spend their time trying to heal and move on, to do better, to never be that person to someone else. Draco stands here, thinking about himself and how he deserved worse. If it had been Harry, he’d be looking for ways to make Draco comfortable._ _

__Harry is still sitting in the same position, slouched and mechanical, eyes blank. Draco kneels and looks into his eyes._ _

__“Harry? Do you want to lie down?”_ _

__No response. Draco expected that._ _

__“Alright,” he says. “Can you hear me, at least?”_ _

__Harry says nothing, merely blinks._ _

__“Two blinks for yes, three for no,” Draco says eventually, growing increasingly desperate. Harry stares._ _

__Questions aren’t working. He tries commands instead._ _

__“Scoot back on the bed, Harry,” he says, gently coaxing. Harry seems to register it, a dull spark igniting somewhere in the depths of his brilliant eyes. He moves back on the bed, until only his socked feet are hanging off the edge. Draco wants to cry with relief._ _

__“Lie back,” he says. “Head on the pillow.”_ _

__Harry lets his body drop, as though he’s been Imperiused._ _

__“Okay, okay good,” Draco says, at a loss now. He needs Harry to sleep it off, but he doubts it works that way. “Okay, close your eyes now.”_ _

__Harry does._ _

__Like this, with his breaths as even and shallow as they are, Draco can imagine what his mother must have seen when she’d seen Harry crash onto the leafy forest floor, hit by the Killing Curse, square in the chest. He doesn’t want the image in his head, so he catalogues the differences._ _

__Harry is wearing fitted clothes now, his own, bought with his money. He looks good in them and Draco’s touches are everywhere, in the turn of his collar and the colour of his jeans. There are no cuts or scrapes or scratches anywhere on him, just dark skin, elegant and beautiful._ _

__His heart aches as he realises this skin is what the world has been taught to hate by generations of relentless indoctrination. Harry is so beautiful, how could he hate–?_ _

__It doesn’t make sense, but it is agony nevertheless. If Draco wasn’t holding himself accountable for Harry’s care, he would have stormed back onto the streets and found the boys and–_ _

__He inhales and exhales. Violence is not what Harry would advocate for. Harry would advocate for care. Don’t let Voldemort steal your compassion, Draco reminds himself, a continuous mantra, invoking any and all inner recesses of calm lingering in his corrupted spirit. He deserves better._ _

__He gets up, draws the curtains, shrouds the room in comforting darkness and makes himself comfortable on the sofa to wait._ _

__—_ _

__Harry dreams of Dudley._ _

__Dudley used to play a game where he assembled all his friends from darkest to lightest. Some of them were sun-browned white boys who didn’t burn when they tanned. Some of them were pasty skinned, sickly looking boys who didn’t look like the sun had ever touched them. Dudley, an entitled gleeful sack of inappropriate joy, would arrange his friends like a twisted shade card in the backyard of Privet Drive where the neighbours would not play witness to his perverted bullying._ _

__And then he would drag Harry out, kicking and screaming by the elbow and make fun of him for being so much darker than even his darkest friend._ _

__“His father was dirt, Mum says,” Dudley would say, grinning at his friends. “That’s where he gets that colour from.”_ _

__Harry would hide his face in his hands in shame and try to tune out the boys’ cruel laughter._ _

__—_ _

__“Draco?” comes a soft voice from the bed and Draco startles into awareness._ _

__“Yeah,” he says, clearing his throat when it catches on the word. “Yeah, I’m here.”_ _

__It’s dark in the room now, the dusk outside a deep indigo. Harry is a lump on the bed, a thin sheet drawn over him, Draco’s compromise between the urge to not cover him at all and the urge to keep him protected from every force of the outside world—winter cold and vitriolic racism alike—with a weighted blanket warring in his brain._ _

__“What happened?” Harry asks, tentative and broken. Draco’s heart clenches._ _

__“How much do you remember?”_ _

__“I—we were walking and then, the cyclists and the boy, he said—” Harry’s breath hitches._ _

__“Yeah,” Draco interrupts. “Yeah, that. And then I brought you here and put you to bed and you knocked yourself out for a few hours.”_ _

__For a few minutes Harry says nothing and then whispers a heartbreakingly soft, “Oh.”_ _

__“Harry,” Draco says, desperate. “Harry, can I—”_ _

__“Come here, Merlin, please—”_ _

__“Oh, Salazar, Harry, what the fuck—” He’s up and out of the sofa in a heartbeat, crossing over to the bed, sitting down and curling the upper half of his body over Harry’s, bodily putting himself between the man on the bed and the rest of the world. He brings his arms around Harry’s neck and holds him and breathes out in broken relief when Harry clings just as tightly to his waist._ _

__“Fuck,” Harry whispers and Draco’s cheek wets with Harry’s tears. “Fuck.”_ _

__“You’re safe,” Draco says, frantically, convincingly. “You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe. You’re with me. You’re safe. I’ll never let them hurt you again, I’ll never hurt you again, you’re safe.”_ _

__Harry burrows deeper into Draco’s neck and mumbles in a broken whisper, “I’m safe?”_ _

__“You’re safe.”_ _

__“I’m safe.”_ _

__They repeat it, back and forth, an assurance morphing into a chant, morphing into a promise, into a bond, into a pact. Harry’s safe. Harry’s safe. Harry’s safe._ _

__“I’m—”_ _

__“Don’t fucking apologise.”_ _

__“But—”_ _

__“Don’t _fucking_ apologise.” _ _

__Another beat of silence._ _

__“Okay,” Harry says eventually. “But you should know I don’t always react like that to everything that doesn’t go my way.”_ _

__A hysterical laugh bubbles up in Draco. “Everything that doesn’t—Harry, what? They, they said—it’s not just something not going your way, Salazar and Morgana, Harry—”_ _

__“Is my name a curse now?” Harry asks, a little amused._ _

__“Might as well be, you fucker,” Draco swears. “It’s not—it’s not some trivial thing that—”_ _

__“No,” Harry says, and he sounds serious. “No, it’s not. Just that. The word, or whatever. I just don’t react well to that one.”_ _

__“Okay…”_ _

__“My relatives were not great people,” Harry says and Draco tries to keep up, tries to understand where this is going and falls short. “I think you might have heard of them? I lived with my aunt and uncle before Hogwarts. And… and during some breaks. They had a son too.”_ _

__“Yes,” Draco says hesitantly. “There were some rumours that you weren’t best mates with the bunch of them.”_ _

__Harry snorts softly. “That’s putting it very lightly. I…” He pauses to take a breath. “I didn’t know I was a wizard before Hagrid showed up to their house on my eleventh birthday and told me.”_ _

__Draco frowns. “Didn’t you…? Accidental magic?”_ _

__Harry sighs, very gently. “Yes, I… did. And my aunt, my mother’s sister, she—she said it was me being a freak.”_ _

__There’s deathly silence in the room. Draco doesn’t dare breathe. The words make no sense because surely Harry’s relatives didn’t–_ _

__“They hated me,” Harry says. “They hated who I was and they hated that they had to take care of me, they hated who my parents were and they… they hated the colour of my skin. They hated that my mother married a brown man. Diluting the blood.”_ _

__Oh and isn’t that ironic, the pure-blood society hating James Potter for diluting the blood by marrying a Muggle-born and the Muggles hating Lily Evans right back for—_ _

__Oh Merlin and Morgana._ _

__He doesn’t _want_ to understand this. _ _

__“But I showed up on their doorstep and they couldn’t turn me away because Dumbledore spoke to my aunt and she had issues but I believe she did actually love my mother at some point, no matter how much of a mess their relationship became. And she didn’t take good care of me but she couldn’t leave me to rot in a dumpster.”_ _

__“The wizarding world would have hailed you as a hero through your growing years,” Draco whispers, agonised. “They would have…”_ _

__“I know,” Harry says, wryly. “But as it happens, I grew to the ripe old age of eleven in the cupboard under the stairs without knowing that I was a wizard. They told me my parents died in a car crash and that my father—the irresponsible… the irresponsible thing that he was, was drunk driving with my mother and me. They didn’t tell me I was a wizard and that they hated him for that, but they told me I had it… I had it in my blood to be like him and his kind.” Harry swallows. “They used the slurs that they said today. For my father. For me. Never in public, never where anyone could hear them but they said it in the house. And in the kitchen when I was too sleep deprived to cook or clean. Or when I dropped the dishes or forgot something or…”_ _

__Draco can’t hear more of this._ _

__“It’s skin colour,” Draco says, pained and miserable. “Harry, it’s skin.”_ _

__“It’s centuries of racial oppression,” Harry says, carefully and factually. “It’s… a culture they don’t understand. It’s superiority they don’t deserve. And I am… unmoored, Draco. I grew up with this skin and my roots without knowing where I come from, what this skin means and what it’s associated with. The land, the culture, the spaces and places, I don’t—I don’t know any of it. I don’t understand it. I can’t speak the language, I—”_ _

__He breaks off with a cough and a sputter. Draco rests his forehead on Harry’s shoulder._ _

__“It’s skin,” he whispers again because none of what he just said negates that._ _

__“And Muggle-borns bleed red,” Harry says. He doesn’t sound frustrated or angry, just resigned, as though a point he has been trying to drive home has finally penetrated after a hard won battle. To be fair, Draco supposes it has._ _

__“I’m sorry,” Draco says, muffled and horrified. “Merlin, Harry, I’m sorry.”_ _

__“I know,” Harry says, kissing the crown of his head. “I know.”_ _

__In the darkness, they are just skin and bones and blood. In the light, they’re just hopes and dreams and ambitions. In the middle, in the dusk and the dawn of every day, they are growth and change and the possibility of a future._ _

__Draco breathes. Harry echoes him._ _


	10. Chapter 10

_Look at us, she said. We are all of us in this room  
still waiting to be transformed. This is why we search for love.  
We search for it all our lives,  
even after we find it.  
—An Endless Story, Louise Glück_

In December, Harry tells Draco he doesn’t want to go to India. 

“What?” Draco asks, confused. “I thought you—” 

Harry shrugs, unwilling to meet his eyes. 

“What brought this on?” Draco asks, eyes sharp and expression demanding. A few months ago, it would have made Harry furious. Now he sees it for what it really is, an expression of concern disguised under cold factuality and rational understanding of the situation. He responds in kind. 

“I don’t think I’m ready for that much of a culture shock, yet.” 

Draco’s eyes are still sharp but the edges around them soften. The thin line of his mouth looks less cruel. He pulls Harry in for a gentle kiss, all winter warmth and hearth fire comfort, insistent and grounding. Harry melts into it, lets Draco lead the dance of it, revelling in the knowledge that someone knows him well enough to put the exact right amount of pressure to make him yield to their touch. 

“You don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for,” Draco says and Harry blushes a little. It isn’t meant to sound like a reference to the fact that Harry has been holding off a little adamantly on penetrative sex, waiting for something he doesn’t quite know the details of yet. Draco says the same thing when he loses his mind over it, apologising to Draco profusely for making him wait, asking him if he’s okay with it over and over, _you don’t have to do anything you’re not ready for._

Harry is coming to believe that Draco means it as a blanket promise, that sex isn’t somehow separate from who they are in their day to day lives. Consent is consent everywhere and Draco will not push in or out of bed if Harry isn’t ready for something. 

When it comes to India, it’s just as complicated as sex. In fact, the situation is ridiculously similar. He’s waiting for something, some sign or symbol or signal that he should plunge headfirst into something he had not even contemplated for the first seventeen years of his life. The Gryffindor in him is roaring with frustration and the cautious boy is reigning the lion in with wary questions and an unwillingness to take a step forward into the unknown without adequately safeguarding his heart. 

But Draco pulls him in again, his kisses all fire and marshmallow sweet lips and a hint of vodka underneath his tongue and Harry forgets all about inhibitions. 

—

Two weeks later, Draco finds Harry with a letter in his hand, sitting blankly on the windowsill, watching the setting sun from their window, the birds spiralling through the sky to find a safe place to roost, the people jostling each other. He looks thoughtful and a little anxious. When Draco asks him what’s wrong, he startles and holds the letter up. 

“Ron proposed,” he says. “To ‘Mione. In Australia.” 

Draco is a little taken aback. He doesn’t know how to respond so he defaults to, “When you write back, do wish them a hearty—” 

But Harry’s already shaking his head, the wistful expression on his face growing more entrenched by the second. 

“She said no,” he says. Well, then. That’s awkward, isn’t it? 

“They’re still together?” 

Harry snorts. “Merlin, yes. It’s the war fucking with Ron’s head. Makes him think there’s no time for anything, that he needs to rush it, needs to fill out some checklist by the time he’s twenty-one. ‘Mione’s been trying to get through to him.” 

Draco knows all too well about the war and the headfuckery it likes to perform, so he nods in acknowledgment and says nothing. 

“But isn’t he right in a way?” Harry continues, looking down undeterred at the letter, a frown marring his brow. “There’s no reason to not do the things we’re sure about. To not do what we know we want to do eventually anyway. If I want to do something two years later and I know I want to do it, and I have the time now, why wouldn’t I?” 

Draco shrugs a little. He sees the logic but he also sees a glaring fault: “You aren’t ready for everything you will be ready for two years from now. Time is a healing process all in itself. There is hardly any reason to rush it.” 

Harry exhales and looks back out at the window. 

“Sometimes you’re right,” he says, trailing a finger along the glass. “Sometimes, I wish you weren’t.” 

—

Harry had not prepared himself for the eventuality of Draco Malfoy. 

He had prepared himself in abstraction for what the trip would probably entail and then adjusted his expectations around what he got to know of Draco. But somewhere, he’d forgotten to factor in the sleepy bedhead of a blond man who wasn’t fully functional without a cup of coffee, forgotten to factor in the mind-melting kisses, the arbitrary hypothetical questions about philosophy and the universe, the slow hand jobs and the slower blow jobs. 

Harry had not prepared himself for the man he’s faced with, nothing abstract about the sharp lines of his stomach or the sharp slant of his smile or the crooked twist of his eyebrows. Harry is falling, fast and hard and irrevocably in love. 

There had been no warning signs for this. The universe hadn’t sent him any and the bells in his head had not gone off. There had only been two bedrooms booked in Florence that eventually became one booked in Rome, there had been eyes meeting in the bathroom mirror over toothpaste and shaving cream, there had been Draco’s sweet tooth finding its way into their kisses, the lingering taste of sugar a constant on his lips. 

There had been falling. What’s more, Harry is still falling and he finds himself a little surprised by how unfazed he is at the possibility of striking the ground at some point—hard. 

He doesn’t know how to put it into words—the dual battle in his head, a war of attrition between the urge to simply do what he knows he needs to and to give himself time to get used to the ideas of it. 

He settles on a compromise. 

“We’d said six and six, can we do eight and four?” 

“What?” Draco asks, looking up from the newspaper he had been peering at. It’s local, and obviously in Italian. Draco’s Italian is rusty but he’s trying to pick it back up. He looks adorable now, hair mussed and mind barely present in the conversation. 

“India,” Harry clarifies. “We said before we came that we’d spend six months here and six months there. But I… am not ready. And if I don’t give myself a timeline, I doubt I ever will.” 

“That timeline doesn’t have to be within my exile if you don’t want it to be,” Draco says. Harry still holds his breath when the word comes up in conversation— _exile_ —waiting for Draco’s face to fall or his words to grow colder. But with growth seems to have come a certain degree of acceptance and Draco doesn’t necessarily like his year of forced holiday, but he’s come to understand that if he must live through it, not shutting down every time its mentioned would be a good place to start with getting used to his circumstances. 

“I…” Harry breathes. “I want it to happen soon. I just don’t know how I’ll react.” 

Draco turns a page of his newspaper. “Take your time,” he says. “I’ll be there.” 

—

On Christmas Eve, when the streets are bedecked with Christmas ornaments and lights, the tree in the Square an attraction to which the children of the neighbourhood flock to, Harry presses his nose against the cold glass, holding Draco’s hand. 

“I’ve never spent Christmas anywhere except the Manor,” Draco tells Harry, wincing when he hears the tremble in his words. Harry turns, just a little, and beckons him closer. Draco steps hesitantly into the circle of his arms and finds his temple kissed achingly slow. 

“I’ve never spent Christmas outside of Britain,” Harry offers. It’s not the same, but it’s something and Draco realises that they’re both still unsure of how and what to do and that all of it doesn’t have to always make sense. 

“I miss my mother,” Draco says. 

Harry kisses his temple again, this time slower. “I’m sure she misses you too.” 

“It’ll be her first Christmas alone,” he breathes out and Harry’s hand sifts through his hair. It’s comfort and it’s a touch of regret and Draco leans into it and lets himself feel a little terrible. It’s an indulgence he allows himself only today. 

“Next Christmas won’t be so lonely for either of you,” Harry vows. Draco turns towards him in surprise. 

“I’m not lonely,” he says, looking pointedly at Harry who blinks and then smiles. “I’m not lonely at all.” 

“That’s good to know then,” Harry says with a bashful expression that Draco wants to kiss right off his stupidly handsome face. So he does. 

—

On New Year’s Eve, they kiss at midnight. 

On the 2nd of January, Harry drags Draco to the Portkey Office and books two to Mumbai, India for March. 

“I have something to ask you,” Harry tells him, when they’re back at the hotel room, lying side by side on the upturned duvet. 

Draco says nothing, merely tilts his head in curious expectation. 

Harry breathes out, steeling himself. 

“I want to have sex. Once we… once we go. To India.” 

Draco’s expression turns significantly less mild and far more meaningful. 

“We’re already having sex,” he points out, a little redundantly. Harry exhales and tries to not be annoyed. 

“You know what I mean,” he says. Draco is silent, but when their eyes meet, the understanding could not be clearer between them. 

“Okay,” Draco says. “As long as you’re sure. You don’t have to. You can take it back anytime.” 

“I’m safe,” Harry says and Draco startles. It’s a reference to an evening neither of them really speak about. He can tell Draco hadn’t expected it. But it’s an important reminder: Draco promised him safety and this is Harry trusting Draco to make good on it. 

“You’re safe,” Draco agrees after a moment. 

_I will never hurt you again._

There is a man with half of Harry’s heart and he doesn’t even know it. Harry smiles. 

—

January segues into a vibrant February, all blooming buds on trees and soft sunrises and softer sunsets. Pink and gold and lush green exist in starbursts of colour and natural glory all around them. 

Harry surreptitiously makes a few extra buds bloom for Draco’s amusement. Draco Conjures likenesses of pixies that dart among the flowers for Harry to smile at. 

There was a war and they were both soldiers. There is an aftermath and they’re both boys, trying to find their place in the world. 

It’s not easy, but it’s them and Draco wouldn’t give it up for the world. 

Night falls and Draco teaches Harry to find the constellation he’s named after. Night progresses and they kiss, deeper and deeper until Draco doesn’t know where they both end and begin, an inseparable whole of tangled limbs and sheets and blankets and laughter. 

Night progresses, and they sleep.

There was a war and Draco fell and Harry died. The war ended and Draco dragged himself back up on his feet, mother’s son, father’s disappointment and Harry rose from the dead, mother’s son, father’s joy, the world’s saviour. 

Now, in the darkness, fingers tracing absent patterns onto each other’s skin, thoughts racing and catching up, and tangling, perhaps, there is peace.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of HD Erised 2020; thank you so much for reading! You can show your appreciation for the author in a comment below. ♥


End file.
